Smells like teen idiots: the Twitter meme so moronic it literally makes no sense

This story makes no sense. Let’s get that out of the way. It is a tale of social media vapidity, viral marketing and unabashed plagiarism run utterly amok.

On February 8, for reasons unknown to us, there began a sudden explosion of Twitter accounts that all did the exact same thing: pair a random stock image from the site Feelgrafix.com with an unrelated bit of teen-speak. By the accounts’ own admissions, there’s nothing novel, clever or even intelligent going on here; they all have names like “NoSensePosts” and “No Sense Made.” But they’ve also racked up tens - even hundreds - of thousands of followers, sometimes in the span of just a few days.

“Nonsensical image-caption juxtapositions are the new hot meme amongst original thinkers on Twitter dot com,” bemoaned Paolo Ordoveza, the viral debunker who tweets as @PicPedant and first noticed the trend in mid-February. By then, some two dozen accounts had cropped up. There are now just over 30.

It’s difficult to pin down exactly who started the “No Sense” wave and how these accounts are related to one another. Judging by the timing of their first tweets, a number are owned by the same person

But the phenomenon does open a window on the weird and vaguely scammy world of “social influencer” marketing - informal networks of inane social media accounts that RT and repost each other to massive popularity.

In a 2014 story for Buzzfeed, Ryan Broderick explains the process this way: First, entrepreneurs (often teens) start up accounts on generically relatable topics, like “things girls say” or “sex facts of life”. They then co-ordinate with each other to boost their follower accounts, usually by trading retweets. Once an account has enough followers, the owner can charge hundreds of dollars to run an ad on it - and thousands more to sell it off.