A picture of a plain little egg has poached the title of most-liked Instagram post from Kylie Jenner. The photograph, uploaded on January 4th, had the explicit aim of overtaking Jenner’s record breaking birth announcement to become the most-liked post on the service. The egg post officially passed Jenner’s 18 million likes on Sunday evening, and currently has just over 24.5 million likes.
In an Instagram story responding to the win, the account’s owner “Egg Gang” said, “This is madness. What a Time to be alive,” and thanked their followers for support. In response Kylie Jenner posted a short video of her cracking an egg onto the ground with the caption, “Take that little egg.”
Egg Gang is not the only user to have attempted to amass a huge number of likes or followers with a joke account or simple post. On Twitter, Half an Onion amassed 635,000 followers in an attempt to overtake the popularity of Donald Trump’s account. And, as Taylor Lorenz documents over at The Atlantic, there are numerous other Instagram accounts which post identical photographs every day in an attempt to quickly gain followers.
Egg Gang’s picture of an egg appears to have cracked the viral formula, despite dozens of other accounts with names like “world.record.egg.official” and “world_record_eqq” scrambling to cash in on its success.
theverge.com
