Engineered to go viral
If you were online in 2014, you couldn’t avoid the Ice Bucket Challenge starting that summer. Videos of the ice water dousings took off on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Vine, the now dead short-video app. But the challenge really went big on Facebook’s news feed.
That wasn’t entirely an out-of-the-blue happenstance. The company now called Meta helped engineer the Ice Bucket Challenge to go viral to fuel Facebook’s makeover – from a place where you mostly shared text posts and photos with your personal connections into a hot spot for general video entertainment and discussing hot topics.
Months before the Ice Bucket Challenge took off, Facebook had started to automatically play videos as you scrolled through the news feed. (That doesn’t seem unusual now because every app and website does it.)
The auto-play feature helped make videos hard to ignore as you scrolled Facebook, as part of the company’s campaign to get big in online video. That strategy helped Ice Bucket Challenge videos explode in popularity.
The company had also recently debuted hashtags and “trending” topic lists to nudge you to use Facebook to share news, gab about celebrities and TV shows and generally get a sense of what was happening in the moment. That was all a strategy in Facebook’s then-fierce rivalry with Twitter.
The virality of the Ice Bucket Challenge proved that you would post, watch and share videos on Facebook by the billions. It showed that Facebook could be a destination to see what people around you were chatting about, even if you had no personal connection to them.
And that’s what Facebook is today: another online gathering place where you don’t need friends at all. In the legal case to decide whether Meta is an illegal monopoly, the company said this month that only 17% of time we spend on Facebook, and 7% of time on Instagram, is with friends’ posts.
(It’s not clear how Meta measures these statistics, which support the company’s legal defence.)
The role of the Ice Bucket Challenge in the makeover of Facebook and Instagram is a perfect example of how the online world as it exists today didn’t just happen because it’s what you like. It’s also the result of deliberate decisions to suit the business prerogatives of a handful of powerful people like Zuckerberg.
“To this day, many people my age and younger have no idea that this was at all pushed by Facebook,” said Steffi Cao, a 26-year-old internet culture writer who has assessed the lasting influence of online events from 2014, including the Ice Bucket Challenge.
Viral moments come at you so fast now
Online influencers and viral moments didn’t originate with the Ice Bucket Challenge. But Debra Aho Williamson, who was a veteran social media analyst at the time, said the popular videos with big names proved the power of online virality to companies with products to sell and to the rest of us.
Williamson, who now runs the consumer AI and marketing advisory firm Sonata Insights, said it also seems quaint by 2025 standards that the Ice Bucket Challenge was so widely popular for many months online.
Now there are viral online moments constantly – like those AI-generated action figurines or last summer’s “very demure, very mindful” TikTok trend – while “there are probably hundreds of other mini-trends that never take off” or are quickly forgotten, she said.
So the next time you watch a stranger’s video on Instagram, know that the Ice Bucket Challenge is one factor that helped remake social media into algorithmically programmed TV. When you watch your favourite travel channel on YouTube or buy a product you saw on TikTok, know that those icy videos from 2014 helped shape your experiences.
