School Walkout

Submission 192

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About

School Walkout refers to an ironic meme trend where people make posters proposing a "school walkout," a form of protest, to defend a celebrity that has been arrested or cancelled. The earliest viral ironic school walkout flyers were created in 2018 for the Free Bobby Shmurda campaign. Ironic school walkout posters became a popular meme format in the early 2020s.

Origin

The earliest known "Free X" "School Walkout" meme was a Free Bobby Shmurda poster that went viral in April 2018. An April 2nd, 2018 post on Twitter^[5] (now called X) shows one such poster.

Another early post from April 20th, 2018 was uploaded on KYM,^[1] after being sourced from an Imgur link that has since been deleted (seen below).

Spread

School walkout memes grew more popular starting in 2023. An 11th May 2023 iFunny^[2] post reading, "Free George Santos" was reposted on X^[3]^[4] throughout 2023, often gathering several thousand likes.

On December 14th, 2023, the Instagram^[6] page @detroil_reels posted a "Free Draymond Green" meme, gathering over 68,000 likes in ten months.

On August 15th, 2024, X^[7] user @AliceClimbers posted a meme that read, Free Xiaopang, gathering over 81,000 likes in a month.

On September 17th, 2024, X^[8] user @OJSIMPS0NBURNER posted an ironic "Free Diddy" school walkout poster, gathering over 1,000 likes in ten days.