TikTok trends from 2025 that we couldn’t resist
Here are our favorite TikTok trends from 2025 including the Nicki Minaj high heel challenge, Group 7 and the “Air walk” from “Dancing with the Stars.”
From AI videos of fruits as reality show contestants to the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular getting a taste of his own medicine, a lot has happened on the internet this year. Here’s a list breaking down some of our favorite trends and discourses so far.
‘2026 is the new 2016’
At the start of this year, “2026 is the new 2016” became an inescapable trend. People were sharing photos of themselves wearing galaxy-print clothes and using harsh Instagram filters from the app’s early days. Some posted videos of themselves doing the old “Mannequin Challenge.” And many just reminisced about a simpler time, when Tumblr was the social media platform of choice. Reportedly, 55 million videos using TikTok’s “2016” filter were created in the first week of January.
TheBurntPeanut / The Faithful Sheriff
In January, netizens were shocked to find that many men were watching a virtual peanut dance, play video games and tell poor jokes on a livestream every day. His name is TheBurntPeanut, and he ascended to become the number-one most-watched streamer on Twitch that month, rising to 11.3 million hours viewed in January: a 29 percent increase from Dec. 2025. Many were wondering, who’s watching this? And then women started filming their boyfriends and husbands spending their free time consuming the ramblings of the animated goober. (The man behind the persona is still unknown.)
As if the situation wasn’t weird enough, new copycat anthropomorphic food streamers started popping up online – including another peanut, The Faithful Sheriff, this one with a mustache and a cowboy hat, who preaches the word of Jesus Christ on “Fortnite.” YouTube videos about him earned millions of views. Meme creators made fun of him for being a cringe copy of a cringe streamer, so much so that he eventually got rid of the peanut persona altogether, adopting a cat cop avatar instead.
Clavicular getting brutally framemogged
Slang terms from online incel culture have taken over the vocabularies of Gen Z and Gen Alpha this year. At the forefront of this trend is looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular, who maximizes (“maxxs”) his looks through both natural and unnatural means so that he can “mog” (dominate through physical appearance) any less handsome male in his way. That’s why it was so funny when Clavicular got “framemogged” by a frat bro at Arizona State University in February, meaning his shoulder width (“frame”) looked scrawny by comparison.
Internet users humorously treated the news like a major global update. New looksmaxxers entered the lore – many compared them all to the WWE universe in viral posts. Clavicular also faced controversies in the following months, like singing an anti-Semitic song at a Miami club and being arrested in Fort Lauderdale for shooting an alligator on livestream. The 20-year-old became the symbol of the looksmaxxing movement, scandals and all.
Neal the Seal, Punch the Monkey and Jimothy the Raccoon
Let’s talk animals. Every year, the internet loses it over a few. Neil the Seal is one in 2026. He’s a large, teenage elephant seal who’s beloved by a small coastal town in Tanzania, Australia. He’s also a nuisance, as he’s always in the road, lounging around and blocking up traffic. But who cares? It’s Neil!
Next we’ve got Punch the Monkey, who’s so cute it hurts. Punch is a baby monkey at Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan who is always getting chased off and seemingly bullied by the bigger, older primates. But Punch has his stuffed orangutan toy, which he hugs like it’s his momma. The internet fell in love with Punch’s sweet, scared energy, but the zoo then got so popular with superfans that they began breaking into his enclosure. Not cool.
And what is Jimothy? We don’t exactly know. He’s a raccoon, but he’s shaped like a capybara. He’s got a short spine that makes him goofy-looking. He went viral in an Instagram video from July, taken in the Seattle area. Kiana Hall, the person who filmed it, named Jimothy “Jimothy” because “he looked like a Jimothy,” according to an interview with The Seattle Times. The internet has since showered him with fan art and memes. A caption on one from Instagram artist @lightdraconis reads, “It’s okay to be weird.”
Jake Shane’s uncomfortable red carpet
Influencer Jake Shane was interviewing stars on Vanity Fair’s Oscars after-party red carpet, and asked Julia Fox if she thought the kid in her movie “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” was “so annoying.” Fox responded by saying, “It’s not that it’s the mother’s fault or the child’s fault… It’s society’s fault. It sets mothers up to fail. Even the fact that school gets out at 3 but most jobs are done at 5 or 6 — all of those little things are … not conducive to mothering.” Still, Shane tried to continue the bit, creating a very awkward tension that culminated in Fox saying, “We’ve dragged this on,” before ending the chat. This exchange blew up, raising questions about whether influencers should be the ones doing red-carpet interviews.
Scientology speedruns
Teenagers running full speed into Church of Scientology buildings became a trend in May. “Speedrun” is a video game term referring to a challenge to finish a game as quickly as possible, and so-called “Scientology Speedruns” were all about seeing how far a group could get into the secretive churches as if they were players trying to unlock new levels, drawing crowds of 40 to 50 people in some places. Some were arrested for the shenanigans, like a 20-year-old influencer in Atlanta and three teenagers in Seattle, who faced hate crime and burglary charges.
GoFundMe dramas
One of the biggest sources of drama this year: GoFundMes. In May, YouTube beauty guru James Charles berated a woman who sent him a DM asking him to donate to her GoFundMe after she was laid off from Spirit Airlines following the company’s shutdown. He called out her DM in a TikTok video and told her to go get another job. The biggest reason he was upset was that she wasn’t following him and said in an apology video that people treat him as a “personal ATM.”
Then, in August, Jools Lebron, the woman who popularized the “Very Demure” trend in 2024, asked her followers to donate to her GoFundMe to pay for emergency dental surgery, prompting debate over whether an influencer with over two million followers should be asking for money. Both incidents revealed different aspects of the current state of empathy.
AI fruit ‘Love Island’
Within the past year, short-form microdramas became one of the internet’s newest obsessions. In June, that trend merged with the proliferation of AI content, as one of the most-watched microdramas was “AI Fruit Love Island” — a series that saw humanoid fruit characters as contestants on a fictionalized “Love Island.” The 60-second videos amassed over 92 million views, according to the creators’ official website, and were jam-packed with drama among the five characters: Cherrita, Bananito, Strawberrina, Strawberto and Chocolatina.
Peter Pan Girl
In August, Disneyland superfan Christina Toni Kulusich became known online as the Peter Pan Girl after a video of her interacting with a Peter Pan actor amassed more than 29 million views. Many thought she was over-enthusiastic and were worried for the actor, and in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY, Kulusich said that her week in the viral spotlight was “a little rough.” She insisted she treats the actors with respect, largely because she worked at Disneyland before. Kulusich became a symbol of Disney Adult culture and its childlike nature, with people making memes of her. But Kulusich is proud of her Disney fandom because it means “letting out your inner child.”
Alex Cooper v. Alix Earle
After Alix Earle’s podcast “Hot Mess” was announced to be leaving the Unwell Podcast Network back in March 2025, there was speculation about what happened between her and network founder Alex Cooper. Finally, in April of this year, Cooper uploaded a video to TikTok claiming Earle started to drum up “fake drama” and gave Earle permission to clear the air, saying, “There’s no NDA. No one is stopping you.” To which Earle said, “Okay on it.”
In her recently released Netflix reality series, “Earle Meets World,” Earle accused Cooper of getting her drunk before they filmed her “Call Her Daddy” interview and said she felt taken advantage of and manipulated by her former boss. The drama between two of the most popular influencers is likely not over yet.