Fake Fantas

Submission 4,553

Part of a series on Foodom. [View Related Entries]

About

Fake Fantas is a Twitter bot acting as a single-topic blog that generates parody flavors of the soft-drink Fanta for humorous effect.

Origin

On May 13th, 2018, Twitter^[1] user @freezydorito tweeted a picture of three Fanta flavors and the caption, "im doing some soft drink research for a potential twitter bot and oh my god 90s fanta looked like fucking lacroix." The post (shown below, left) received more than 60 likes in less than two weeks.

One week later, @freezydorito posted^[2] a mock Fanta flavor called "Wet Potato" with the caption "anyway its bot time cant deprive the world of uuuhh *checks smudged writing on hand*." The post (shown below, right) is the earliest known Fake Fanta example.

That day, the Twitter^[3] account @fakefantas launched. The first post (shown below) featured a French Fries-flavored Fanta. The post received more than 40 likes.

Spread

Over the next few days, the Twitter account grew in popularity. On May 21st, the account posted^[4] "Gay Mystery Fanta." The post (shown below, left) received more than 1,000 retweets and 2,000 likes in 24 hours.

Later that day, the account posted,^[5] "🕐 Time for a Communist Blowfish Fanta!" The post (shown below, center) received more than 440 retweets and 1,000 likes in 24 hours.

Additionally, that day, @freezydorito explained how the bot works. They tweeted,^[6] "Okay so I made the emoji names library wrapper type safe by returning mystery instead of null when it doesn’t work (bc emoji parsing is a yet unsolved computer problem) and wow did that pay off or what." The post (shown below, right) received more than 240 likes in 24 hours.

On May 22nd, Twitter^[7] published a Moments page on the Twitter account.