Riot Hipster

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About

Riot Hipster is a nickname given to an activist who was photographed taking a selfie with an iPhone in front of a burning fire during protests held at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany in early July 2017. After the picture began circulating on Twitter, users began photoshopping a cutout of the man in other base images of various contexts.

Origin

On July 7th, 2017, a bearded man dressed in black was photographed taking a selfie in front of a pile of burning trash while protesting the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. The picture was subsequently tweeted by Torsten Beeck, a digital strategist for the German news site Spiegel Online.^[2] Within 72 hours, the tweet received more than 6,200 likes and 2,200 retweets.

Spread

Shortly after, Twitter user @JimmyRushmore^[4] tweeted the photograph with the caption "That feeling when you're overthrowing capitalism but just can't resist taking a selfie on your iPhone 7," garnering upwards of 71,000 likes and 40,000 retweets within three days (shown below).

That day, Spiegel^[1] published an article verifying the authenticity of the photograph. That day, photoshopped images featuring a cutout of the man began circulating on Twitter along with the hashtag #RiotHipster (shown below).

On July 8th, Twitter user @ChristophKappes tweeted that the photograph was real and that he witnessed it in person (shown below). The following day, Redditor Priamosish submitted the original photograph to /r/CringeAnarchy.^[5]