Griefing GTA Car Meets

About

Griefing GTA Car Meets refers to the act of trolling and harassing Grand Theft Auto Online players that are conducting "car meets" to show off their customized in-game cars. While the practice of griefing has existed across multiplayer games for years, GTA Online has gained notoriety for its griefing problems, with car meets becoming a prominent target for harassment over the years. Discussions and videos about car meet griefing in GTA date back to the year 2014.

Origin

Grand Theft Auto Online was released on October 1st, 2013, and many players soon developed a practice of trolling and giving "grief" to each other. Griefing is the act of targeted harassment in a video game in order to annoy or disrupt another player's gameplay. Griefing in GTA commonly takes the form of killing or attacking other players with assorted weapons or weaponized vehicles. Initial bugs and issues with the game's "Passive Mode" exacerbated the game's griefing problem, with trolls circumventing the in-built non-violent gaming option.^[1]

The earliest known viral video of a player griefing a GTA car meet was posted to YouTube by GoonOnFire^[2] on July 21st, 2014, gathering over 92,000 views in eight years (seen below, left). Another viral video of a player harassing a car meet was posted to YouTube by XpertThief^[3] on April 28th, 2018, gathering over 6 million views in four years (seen below, right).

Spread

"Griefing GTA Car Meet" style TikToks first began emerging on the platform in 2020, with TikToker^[4] @arcyal posting a video titled, "day one of griefing GTA online car meets" On April 8th, 2020, gathering over 2.5 million plays and 300,000 likes in two years (seen below, left). On April 30th, 2020, TikToker^[5] @munchymonkeys posted a video with the same title, gathering over 42,000 plays and 4,000 likes in two years (seen below, right).

Griefing car meets continued to be a prevalent TikTok trend for consecutive years, with TikToker^[6] @h1savv2.0 posting a video on May 30th, 2022, gathering over 800,000 plays and 42,000 likes in seven months (seen below, left). On August 11th, 2022, TikToker^[7] @bartjan_de_bever posted a griefing video, gathering over 400,000 plays and 46,000 likes in five months (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References