Elmo Is Just Checking In!

Submission 2,743

Part of a series on Sesame Street. [View Related Entries]

About

Elmo Is Just Checking In! is an X / Twitter post by the official social media account for the Sesame Street character Elmo in which he checked in on how everyone was doing. Posted in late January 2024, the tweet went viral on X as users used it to trauma dump. President Joe Biden also notably replied to the follow-up post from his official @POTUS account.

Origin

On January 29th, 2024, the official X^[1] / Twitter social media account for the Muppet character Elmo (@elmo) wrote, "Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?" The post (shown below) garnered over 172 million views, 46,000 reposts and quote posts, and 109,000 likes in two days.

Spread

Starting on the same day, users on X / Twitter used the post for trauma dumping purposes, replying to it and quoting it with complains about hardships in their lives. On January 29th, 2024, X^[2] user @Seamus_Malek made the earliest viral post within the trend, replying, "Elmo I'm gonna be real I am at my fucking limit." The post (shown below) accrued over 107,000 reposts and 504,000 likes in two days.

Also that day, X^[3] user @TheoGary posted a The Shining GIF captioned, "Me getting ready to trauma dump on Elmo" which received over 15,000 reposts and 166,000 likes in two days (shown below, left). Another quote post made by user @GrantGinder received over 23,000 reposts and 178,000 likes on X^[4] in the same timeframe.

More viral posts trauma dumping on Elmo and imagining the social account manager's reaction to the trend were shared on X in the following hours.

On January 30th, 2024, @elmo made a follow-up post in which Elmo sent love and promised to check in again soon (shown below). The post gained over 49,000 reposts and 324,000 likes on X^[5] in one day.

Later on January 30th, President Biden then replied to the Elmo post in a QRT from the official @POTUS X^[6] account, receiving over 17 million views, 83,000 likes and 17,000 replies in roughly 16 hours (shown below).