Bill Nye Tho

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About

Bill Nye Tho is a parody Twitter account created by comedy writer Lucas Gardner,^[11] which features tweets written from the perspective of a stoner character based on the persona of American science educator Bill Nye. The tweets typically contain made-up scientific factoids and other humorous musings.

Origin

In July 2012, Gardner created the @Bill_Nye_tho^[12] Twitter feed, which gathered upwards of 131,000 followers over the next four years.

Spread

On July 17th, a corresponding single topic Tumblr^[1] for the Twitter account was created to archive the tweets. Two days later, the Twitter feed was temporarily suspended for impersonating a public figure. On July 22nd, a compilation of notable tweets from the feed were highlighting in a listicle on Buzzfeed.^[2] On September 8th, the account posted the tweet "do u ever just stop and say damn most of me is water," gathering more than 5,000 retweets and 1,900 likes in the next four years (shown below, right).^[12]

That month, Twitter suspended the account a second time. At the time of the suspension, @Bill_Nye_tho had attracted nearly 200,000 followers and was gaining between 2,000 and 3,000 retweets per post.^[4] It was revealed that month the account was run by Laughspin^[15] writer Lucas Gardner who told the tech news blog Betabeat^[5] that he had no intention in pursuing the account again after its second suspension.

"I’m just going to let @bill_nye_tho be dead, whether they unsuspend it or not. It had a good enough run, and to be honest, I was pretty fresh out of ideas anyway."

Also that month, a secondary Twitter account @Bill_Nye__Tho^[10] was launched for the character (shown below, left) and a Change.org^[6] petition was launched to repeal the suspension (shown below, right).

In August, The Chive^[3] posted a compilation of notable @Bill_Nye_tho tweets. On December 24th, Redditor 42ismyluckynumber posted a screenshot of a Bill Nye Tho tweet asking why a group of squids isn't called a "squad" (shown below, left). Prior to being archived, the post garnered upwards of 1,700 votes (83% upvoted) and 120 comments on /r/funny.^[16] On October 23rd, 2013, the original account was restored (shown below, right).^[14] On December 10th, 2014, a Facebook^[17] page titled "The Best of Bill Nye Tho" was launched, which gained over 138,000 likes in two years.