Why have Google searches for the phrase "hit or miss" surged in the past 2 months? Come with me on a journey. It starts on Pornhub and ends in your local Walmart. THREAD... 
The story begins with @miakhalifa, formerly the #1 personality on Pornhub, who is both a central character and an innocent bystander. I'm writing this from a coffee shop, so I'll let you Google her if you want more info.
Back in January, an Instagram meme account called trashpump posted a "screenshot" of a fake tweet in which @miakhalifa appears to call out hip-hop artist @smokehijabi for, well, smoking in her hijab. (Context: Mia once wore a hijab in a porn video.) instagram.com/p/BegsSWLlnkB/…
@smokehijabi is half of the Atlanta-based duo iLOVEFRiDAY, along with producer @trapxeno. The two had recently released a song called Travel Ban, which enjoyed a bit of viral success.
iLOVEFRiDAY responded to the fake @miakhalifa tweet (which they said at the time they believed to be authentic) with a diss track called "Mia Khalifa." One verse begins: "Hit or miss / I guess they never miss, huh?"
And speaking of manipulated images... The thumbnails for iLOVEFRiDAY’s videos use the VEVO logo, but they are not actually VEVO music videos. Copyright infringement for sure, but kinda clever tbh.
Enter TikTok. On October 10 (remember when our Google graph started climbing?), TikTok user @nyannyancosplay posted a video lip syncing to the "hit or miss" verse of "Mia Khalifa." m.tiktok.com/v/659958768271…
For the uninitiated, TikTok is an app for sharing 15-second videos. The app lets you use songs or the audio from other users' videos as the audio track for your video, making it fertile ground for lip syncs, memes, and remixes. There are 500m active TikTokers globally.
TikTok is primarily organized around hashtags (they use the word "trends"). With @nyannyancosplay's video, the #hitormiss trend began, snowballing in popularity for the past two months. There are now more than 2.5m (!!) "Hit or Miss" lip sync videos.
Fast forward to December 5. The "hit or miss" lyric had become so ubiquitous in the TikTok community that user itsstomahs thought he could use it as a verbal secret handshake to detect if he was in the presence of other TikTokers IRL, like in Marshalls: m.tiktok.com/v/663131699622…
And so the #tiktoktest was born. Go out to a public place, shout "Hit or miss!" and wait for someone to respond "I guess they never miss, huh?" Over 5k #tiktoktest videos have been published, collectively amassing 30m views.
Walmarts and Targets seem to be the most popular place for the #tiktoktest. It's also been performed on the streets of New York, in a small grocery store in Mexico, and over police radio.
So how did the characters in our story do? iLOVEFRiDAY is the clear winner. “Mia Khalifa” has 35m views on YouTube and is currently the #61 song on the platform in the US. It’s #40 on Spotify’s US Viral 50 chart, with 13m plays. I expect it to climb on both charts this week.
@nyannyancosplay gained a following and became a meme in her own right. But with her popularity came bullying, unwelcome speculation about her gender identity. She disabled the comments on her original video.
itsstomahs, the originator of the #tiktoktest, now has 8k TikTok fans (which may be helpful as he’s pursuing a career as a social media guru for small businesses in Boise, ID), but I think he deserves more for his role in this phenomenon. iLOVEFRiDAY should buy him dinner.
Finally, erstwhile porn star @miakhalifa: She didn’t ask for any of this. I’d say iLOVEFRiDAY should buy her dinner too, but she’s dating chef Robert Sandberg, who used to cook at Noma, so I bet she’s eating pretty well.
Oh, one other casualty: TikTok star @jacobsartorius, whose 2016 song “Hit or Miss” (#73 on the Hot 100) has been eclipsed by all this. At least for now.
/THREAD Thank you for reading.
HIT OR MISS?!
HIT OR MISS?!
