And they’re worlds away from their right-wing counterparts that are influencing public policy and media cycles, like the ongoing firestorm around the viral Libs of TikTok account. Influencers and politicians on the left rarely, if ever, respond to their messages offering help and proposing collaborations.
“It didn’t feel like there were many left-wing accounts like that.”īut despite millions of impressions and efforts to build relationships with power players on and offline, the account’s real-world influence is minuscule, the account’s owner says. “I figured it was worth a shot, and maybe I’d be able to have some influence on the left,” the account creator says about starting Accidentally Based. What began as an experiment soon proved to be a reliable way to get content in front of millions. Just a month after making Accidentally Based, the account had 100,000 followers, the owner estimates, and was getting retweeted by Twitter users with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. One of many so-called gimmick accounts, Accidentally Based was started as a left-wing response to conservative meme accounts that the creator noticed tended to grow quickly. The rapid rise of the Twitter account Accidentally Based surprised even the person who created it.
