Remember when you were little and your friends would dare you to do something? You might have refused at first, but if they broke out the "double dog dare," you knew you had to do it.
The closest thing to a modern day "double dog dare" is the Twitter dare, a phenomena that has yet to be thoroughly documented. If you're on Twitter, you've likely seen posts from users asking for a certain amount of retweets or favorites to perform what they call a "dare." On Tuesday, July 16, 2013, Twitter user @MasoneDylan, tweeted “1000 RTs and ill run across the field.. #ASG #CitiField" during the All-Star Game. When his tweet received over 1,000 retweets, he took off onto the field and was eventually tackled by security guards.
I have two questions. What compels followers to retweet tweets like this in the first place? And, what compels the users to follow-up on a Twitter dare? Retweets and favorites aren't real, tangible things, but they still hold a lot of power in many people's lives.
Twitter dares go both ways. Some "Twitter celebrities," people who are more famous on the site than they are in real life, may often ask their followers to complete a certain task or "dare." For some reason, I follow the often inappropriate Elijah Daniel (@aguywithnolife), and he sometimes posts tweets asking his followers to submit something in exchange for a follow or a direct message from him. One of his recent tweets asked his followers to submit photos of themselves eating butter. People are stupid, so naturally, people did. At the end of the night, he posted a collage of some of the photos he received from the users. The collage has since been deleted, but it was shocking to see what users on Twitter would do for a follow from a guy with the Twitter handle "@aguywithnolife."
Essentially, Twitter dares give users a lot of power. In one way, they provide users the ability to contribute to an action (like retweeting the baseball game tweet). On the other hand, some people can ask their followers to complete a task, and the followers will do so, no questions asked. I can't say I've never retweeted content asking for retweets to complete a dare, but I can promise I will never eat butter for a direct message from anyone.
Here's one more example of a Twitter "dare." Check out the 899 retweets.
