Spicy Boys

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About

Spicy Boys is a proposed nickname for fire ants that spawned a Change.org petition and Instagram comment raid against Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016.

Origin

On March 24th, 2016, Tumblr^[6] user essenceworm submitted a post suggesting to "rename 'fire ants' to 'spicy boys'". Within four months, the post gathered upwards of 138,000 notes.

Spread

In late June 2016, Change.org^[2] user pupperg launched a petition urging Michelle Obama, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg to "rename fire ants to spicy boys!" (shown below). Over the next month, the petition gained over 40,900 supporters.

"It's 2016, there are 36 genders, bayblade might be a new Olympic sport, why aren't we calling fire ants 'spicey boys'"

On July 1st, The @spicy_boys^[9] Twitter feed was launched. On July 2nd, a Change.org^[7] petition titled "Spicy Boys Against The Daily Dot" was created, which accused The Daily Dot of "killing numerous good memes." The following day, The Daily Dot^[8] published an article about the petitions. On July 7th, the original pupperg Change.org^[7] petition reached the front page of the /r/ofcoursethatsathing^[3] and /r/NotTimeAndEric^[4] subreddits. Meanwhile, The Huffington Post^[11] published an article titled "It's Time To Rename Fire Ants 'Spicy Boys'."

Spicy Boi

On July 16th, iFunny^[17] user iCarlyFetish submitted an image announcing a raid against Hillary Clinton's Instagram page, encouraging viewers to comment the phrase "Spicy Boy" on uploaded images. The following day, a 4chan user submitted a post urging viewers to "go on Hillary's Instagram and spam Spicy Boy" (shown below).^[1]

During the raid, people began posting the comment "spicy boi" on Clinton's Instagram feed. On July 18th, Redditor Effective Post submitted a post asking about the "spicy boi" spam comments to the /r/OutOfTheLoop^[12] subreddit. That day, Urban Dictionary^[13] user Spicy anon submitted an entry for "Spicy Boi," defining it as "a text that has been said thousands of times under about every Instagram photo Hillary Clinton has." Meanwhile, the news sites Macleans^[16] and Coed^[15] published articles about the Instagram comment meme.