Stay The Fuck Home

For up-to-date information regarding COVID-19 coronavirus, including prevention and treatment, please visit CDC.gov.

Overview

Stay the Fuck Home, also known as the hashtag #StayTheFuckHome, is a campaign to encourage people to participate in social distancing during the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Background

On March 9th, 2020, Florian Reifschneider, a web developer, launched the website StayTheFuckHome.com.^[1] The site spreads the ethos of the movement. It reads:

Our governments are failing us in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and containing the COVID-19 pandemic. Slow reactions, public appeasement policies, and their urge to stabilize the economy are keeping them from taking the measures it takes to protect millions from this disease. It is time for us, as citizens of this earth, to take action now and do our part in fighting COVID-19.

That day, he tweeted, ^[2] "If our government isn't helping, maybe we need to help ourselves https://staythefuckhome.com" (shown below).

Developments

Online Reception

On March 11th, Redditor ^[2] imitationcheese posted about the campaign in the /r/Coronavirus subreddit. The post received more than 30,000 points (89% upvoted) and 2,100 comments in less than 24 hours.

That day, people began posting about the campaign on Twitter (examples below).

Additionally, that day, Reifschneider tweeted, "Over 100k people have visited the #StayTheFuckHome website, it's on the top of /r/Coronavirus, on the Reddit Frontpage, and I don't even know how to count the numbers of shares and tweets. A big thank you to all for this overwhelming support!"

Media Coverage

On March 11th, HuffPost^[3] published an interview with Reifschneider. He told the outlet:

After the outbreak in Italy and the rising numbers of infected people in other European countries and the US, I got frustrated at the almost negligent reaction that most governments have shown so far. In Germany, the government is still discussing if they should allow people to attend soccer matches and other big events and a large number of people still think this new virus is just like the flu.

Search Interest

External References