George Floyd Challenge | Know Your Meme

About

George Floyd Challenge refers to a social media challenge which calls on people to kneel on the neck of someone for the length of time Minnesota officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd in an effort to prove that Chauvin’s action was not responsible for Floyd’s death. While many expressed outrage at the challenge, it is unclear if it was truly widespread or an effort to create liberal outrage started by anonymous users on 4chan’s /pol/ board.

Origin

After the death of George Floyd, some who believed Officer Chauvin’s knee did not cause his death recreated the scene. The most notable example was a Washington state high school wrestling coach who on May 27th, 2020 posted pictures of his neck being kneeled on, writing, “Not dead yet I’m doing this for Are police officers the media is a race-baiting machine.” He was later fired from his position.

On May 28th, photos circulated of two Minnesotan construction workers who recreated the death, leading to their firing. On May 30th, a picture of two construction workers recreating Floyd’s death was posted to /pol/ with a user commenting “Do the Floyd Challenge,” saying, “Kneel on a buddy’s neck for 8 minutes and post results. I predict anyone can come out fine from this.”

Spread

The following day, a screenshot of a Snapchat post featuring two boys doing a similar action began circulating on Facebook. They were identified as being from Chardon, Ohio. In the UK, three teens were arrested for posting a similar picture to Snapchat captioned “Police Brutality” (shown below, right).

On Reddit, threads about people attempting the challenge spread on /r/iamatotalpieceofshit, /r/memes and /r/awfuleverything. On Instagram, users attempted to dox people in the photographs.

Truthorfiction investigated the challenge and found that most mentions on social media about the challenge condemned it, suggesting it was not widespread outside of outrage. Furthermore, they suggested it may have been encouraged by /pol/, writing,

In our search, we noticed two posts on 4Chan’s /pol/ encouraged others to spread a “George Floyd challenge,” and the image above appeared in one of the threads. However, there was no other indication on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram that any such challenge existed, was common, or existed anywhere outside a possibly misidentified image.

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