Rejected Candy Hearts

Submission 33,822

Part of a series on Valentine's Day. [View Related Entries]

About

Rejected Candy Hearts are a series of images parodying Sweethearts, a type of small heart-shaped candies sold around Valentine's Day, with custom generated messages that are unromantic, off-putting or suggestive in nature. As it is with the actual candies, Rejected Candy Hearts can be seen as a seasonal meme on Twitter that peaks around Valentine’s Day each year.^[3]^[4]

Origin

On February 13th, 2009, Buzzfeed^[8] reported on the ACME Heart Maker^[9], a website that allows visitors to create customized candy hearts with messages that are two lines long with no more than four characters per line.

Spread

On February 13th, 2011, rejected candy hearts went viral on Twitter, spawning a large collection of Sweethearts parodies with custom-generated messages under the hashtags #rejectedcandyhearts and #candyheartrejects. In the following 24 hours, several internet humor sites and blogs ran compilation posts highlighting the best of #rejectedcandyhearts, including Funny or Die^[1] and The Huffington Post.^[2] Around the same time in February 2014, a web-based app called Cryptogram^[5] was launched to allow easy creation of Sweethearts parodies, which was subsequently picked up by Geekosystem^[6] and Geek Sugar^[7] on February 13th.

Bot-Generated Hearts

On February 9th, 2018, Research scientist Janelle Shane published an article entitled "Candy Heart messages written by a neural network" on Tumblr. ^[10] The post outlines her process for creating an A.I. that generates Candy Heart messages (examples below). She writes: "I collected all the genuine heart messages I could find, and then gave them to a learning algorithm called a neural network. Given a set of data, a neural network will learn the patterns that let it imitate the original data – although its imitation is sometimes imperfect." The post received more than 18,000 notes in five days.

Several media outlets published stories on the Candy Hearts, including CNET,^[11] Gizmodo,^[12] The Verge,^[13] The New York Post^[14] and more.

On February 10th, Twitter^[15] published a Moments page on the hearts.