Here’s a very popular tweet: “she is 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.”
Solid. Concise. I can understand why people would relate to the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as hot? And further, who doesn’t already think themselves emotionally complicated enough to shed tears on what is supposed to be a happy day? Nearly 246,000 accounts liked this tweet, and I have no problem with that.
There’s a whole universe of big accounts posting content like this – little bits of language with mass appeal. They often regurgitate the same messages. This “she’s 10” tweet was posted by @itspureluv, an account with roughly 200,000 followers; an almost identical tweet was posted from @spicybabew, another account with nearly 200,000 followers, three months ago, and from dozens more at different times.
“Are you ok” no but I’m beautiful
— ♡ (@itspureluv) October 10, 2022
I started noticing this phenomenon last year and followed about a dozen of these accounts out of a curiosity that felt a bit sick – it gave me chills! They were so good at extracting (or selecting and copying) sentences and snippets that hundreds of thousands of people connected with, and they were doing it without any clear conclusion. They were shameless about retweeting themselves or posting several slightly different versions of a thought to see which one would hit home the most.
Other people on Twitter had noticed them as well and referred to them (usually with irritation) as “gradient accounts”, because many of their profile pictures are not of human faces or anything, just color gradients. Gradient accounts have usernames that sound like AIM usernames: @f41ryluvrr, @urf41ryg1rl, @moonlouvrr, @newmoonbaby2, @glitteryxhearts. Through their tweets, they are identified as overthinkers, dreamers and hot people and often express melancholy and romantic longing. Romantic longing sometimes collides with casual misanthropy; lowercase revelations of trauma and illness are interspersed with play Gossip girl memes. Their content is more popular than I can explain, and they know it. Some provide links so that people who enjoy their content can send them PayPal tips. Others promote small businesses; some lead to pornography.
Ysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in digital media and society at the University of Sheffield in England, told me she had also noticed the gradient accounts last year. She described their presentation as an “infantilized version of femininity.”
“I was initially surprised when I saw these Twitter accounts because I assumed their demographic was older than these posts appear to be,” she said. She saw influences from current Y2K fashion nostalgia — a trend associated with Gen Z — including the use of baby pink and the early abbreviation of text messaging. u instead of you. But she reasoned that Twitter was a good platform for creators who wanted to be largely anonymous and grow their following through text-based posts.
The brazenness of the narratives is what gives them a strange, borderline allure. Who is posting all this stuff and why? @maybeevirgowhich doesn’t use a gradient profile picture (just a solid little pink circle), but is in the same category, has more than 359,000 followers, and doesn’t reveal any personal information other than a bio that reads “made in heaven”.
“Having a blank but highly aesthetic and communicative profile picture is an unexpected move in an age of hyper-self-presentation,” Gerrard told me. “It adds traction to accounts because followers aren’t connecting with one personage. Instead, they are connecting with the familiarity and relevance of the posts.” The entities behind the accounts shouldn’t win over anyone personally over the way they might if their faces were visible, she added.
To some, this is charming; for others, it is ALARMING or annoying. Viral “related” Twitter threads have been used to trick people into scams in the past, which is a good reason to be wary of them. And the repetition from all these accounts makes them look somewhat heartless or inhuman— are copying or being copied, or what they’re saying is so generic that it just keeps blowing out of the ether. (Try searching for saying nvm instead of explaining or “Of course I remembered” is a love language.) Naturally, this leads some people to make the assumption that accounts are bot.
what will i experience… pic.twitter.com/JBxiVl8EGv
– Bobby Wasabi (@bobbyteriyaki) August 5, 2021
“I want to set the record straight,” Andrew Zaffina, the 25-year-old behind @itspureluv, told me when I messaged him on Twitter and asked him to call me. “I’m sick of people thinking we’re robots. I’m literally just a really relatable, laid-back, fun internet personality.”
Zaffina uses his Twitter to draw attention to his other accounts and his businesses—he’s a spirit medium, teaches spiritualism online, and sells hoodies that explain different angel numbers. He says it’s easy to create similar content because he looks at Twitter all day, every day, and his brain has started working on the site’s language.
And in 2022, the language of Twitter is the language of a hot and bothered girl. She was the MySpace girl, then the Tumblr girl, and then the TikTok girl. There’s always been a version of her on Twitter, and now there’s this one. Girl culture has long been highly visible on social media, so it makes sense that people who spend time on social media would relate to the tweeted pieces of micro-fiction that reflect its tropes. “Obviously, the close stuff is similar, but are people interested in it because they identify as a hot and bothered girl?” Alice E. Marwick, an associate professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asked me rhetorically. “Or are they interested in inhabiting the persona of a hot and bothered girl?” She found the accounts’ posts to be “aspirational, in a way,” and suggested there was also an emotional component to their success. “I think the ability to articulate sadness is highly valued,” she said.
When Zaffina posts a new tweet, it must get 1,000 likes within the first hour; otherwise, he thinks it was a mistake and should be deleted. When a new tweet really goes viral, that means it’s time to chill. To avoid being suspended — or “expressed” — Zaffina tries to stay off Twitter’s radar. He suspects that he marks accounts that go viral too often. (Twitter didn’t comment on that when I asked.) “I could go viral several times a day if I wanted to,” he said, “but why would you work so hard to get something taken down?”
if you search for a painful thing, you will find 100 gradient accounts with the same tweet pic.twitter.com/gHljsVl6A9
— andy (@bigbearbucks) September 20, 2021
Some gradient accounts make money by promoting harmful products or bad music videos, which Zaffina thinks make their site look aesthetically offensive. According to Zaffina, super-popular Twitter accounts can also sell “retweet packages” (a flat fee to retweet content to their audience a certain number of times) or collect money for “repeating” smaller accounts ( helping them gain followers simply by liking or replying to their tweets). Once they have reached a mass audience, they can also “flip” their accounts by selling to a lazier user who just wants a ready audience. (Some of these violate Twitter’s terms of service.) Zaffina said he’s done paid promotion before, but he didn’t want to name specific clients or his prices. He would only say that some accounts can charge up to $200 for a single retweet.
“It’s not always about the money for me,” he told me. “I honestly tweet because I love Twitter.” He admitted that he enjoyed the power of being an influencer. If he’s interested in a trend, he can promote and support it just by putting it in an accessible package: “It’s not a gimmick, but the secret is just being a close person.” He thinks about similar content all the time — he was thinking about tweets as we were talking, he said. He can take a hit whenever he wants, with posts like “Sharing music is a great love language for me“or”sexy people think too much about everything.” He will often riff several times on a similar premise or format, and each iteration performs beautifully: “She’s 10 years old, but she needs 24/7 attention” (66,300 likes), “She’s 10 years old, but she doesn’t talk when she’s upset” (290,700 likes, even better than the aforementioned 10 tears on her birthday).
Justifiably, gradient accounts have often been accused of stealing tweets. Zaffina responded to this criticism by insisting that most of its content is “pretty much” original. At the same time, he argued, many of these posts are interpretations of linguistic memes, meaning that anyone taking credit for them is simply flattering themselves. If you start with “she’s 10” and then add something similar, you’ll probably end up writing the same tweet as someone else. And if something is completely recycled, fine: “We don’t really think of it as stolen content,” he said. “It’s just cute tweets.”
The other criticism of gradient accounts is that their tweets are bad. Another way of saying “related” is “lowest common denominator.” (Marwick called them “trivial and uninteresting.”) Just over a year ago, according to Zaffina, Twitter users enabled gradient calculations and started calling for their heads (“these gradient accounts are a foul sore”, “ban all gradient accounts pending federal investigation, etc.). Many of them stopped posting in August and September of 2021 , and Zaffina’s is now one of the few big accounts left. “A lot of people actually changed their profile pictures,” he told me. “They changed all their accounts, changed the way they tweet, they changed everything.” Then, earlier this year, Twitter announced a policy update that would “restrict the visibility” of copied content or “copypasta”—some Read this as a harbinger of the true latter days of gradient calculus, though many have continued to flourish.
sometimes color gradient accounts feel like therapy…. so true marsbby444 i’m not my past self
— britt⁷ 🎃 (@bonsailesbian) September 14, 2021
As long as people are attracted to the bodiless girl in the car, and as long as there’s some loot to be made from racking up the most impressions and the most engagement possible, these accounts will be added and will confuse those who do not have the magic touch. Most of us may be relatable, but that doesn’t mean we know how to tweet appropriately. Does this make sense? “People just don’t know what other people like,” Zaffina told me. “I think there are two types of people in the world. You know, there are just regular people, and then there are entertainers. I am an entertainer. I know what people like. I know how they will feel.”