The snake emoji has rocketed in popularity after thousands of people started deploying it to throw shade at Taylor Swift.
The under-used symbol became the weapon of choice against the singer as her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West erupted last week, seeing more than a quarter of a million uses in a week.
The flood of snakes was seemingly prompted by a Kardashian tweet clearly aimed at Swift, after she accused the married couple of plotting “character assassination” by leaking audio of her approving controversial lyrics in a West rap:
Wait it's legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days! ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) July 17, 2016
The Kardashian fandom promptly followed suit, bombarding Swift’s social media pages with the snake image.
The flood of snakes was so bad that Instagram handed Swift a special tool to mass-delete negative comments, many of which were full of snakes.
According to the emojitracker website, the Swift-hate effect was enough to lift it substantially in the emoji rankings.
When the feud began last week, the snake was placed 270th, behind even relatively obscure symbols like the maple leaf and ace of diamonds playing card.
One week later it has jumped to 264th position on the back of more than a quarter of a million uses on Twitter alone.
On July 18th, when news was still emerging under the hashtag #KimExposedTaylorParty, the snake had 5,150,533 recorded uses.
On July 25th, one week later, it had jumped to 5,397,601 – an increase of 247,068:
In the same time period, the emojis which used to be either side of the snake – the siren and the tropical cocktail – recorded just 34,000 and 43,000 uses respectively.
The surge is likely due to both a large number of new tweets, and the fact that the most enthusiastic snake-tweeters use them by the dozen.
Kardashian, for instance, used 37 snakes in her original anti-Swift missive.
The emojitracker tool only monitors Twitter, but the effect is likely to have been similar on other social networks.
Swift’s Instagram page was also flooded with snakes, until they started mysteriously disappearing.
It later emerged that Swift had been given a special tool which was capable of scrubbing disobliging comments en masse.
The presence of a snake emoji would be a sure-fire flag for criticism, so an easy candidate for instant deletion.
Meanwhile, those eager to taunt Swift have taken to deploying unusual spellings of the word “snake”, presumably to avoid any dictionary filters:
Others have started obliquely referring to “snaks” – possible shorthand for “snacks” – as another way to give their comments a better chance of survival:
You can close the loopholes all you want, but people will always find a way to take a swipe at the celebs they love to hate.
