About

They Live Among Us is an emoji copypasta that grew popular on Twitter in December of 2018. It shows emoji faces of different gender and color, challenging the user to "find the X." It then follows "You can't. They live among us," along with a punchline, usually "they're going to hell."

Origin

On December 2nd, 2018, Twitter user @Rudy_Mustang^[1] started the joke, making it about weed users. The tweet gained over 80,000 retweets and 384,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

As that tweet grew popular, other Twitter users began making their own versions of the joke. User @INDIEWASHERE tweeted a joke about Shape of You, gaining over 4,700 retweets and 27,000 likes (shown below, left). User @s8n made a joke about Furries, gaining over 5,300 retweets and 26,000 likes (shown below, right).

Popular examples to use a different punchline include a post by @jerrywchandler that gained over 780 retweets and 2,500 likes (shown below, left). Another by @explicitcherry praising Lana Del Rey gained over 2,000 retweets and 8,000 likes (shown below, right). The meme was covered by Mashable^[2] and Daily Dot.^[3]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References