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Rebecca Black’s “Friday” didn’t invent being nasty online.

The theorem that online anonymity breeds rude behavior was commonplace well before Black’s parents paid Ark Music Factory a few thousand dollars to craft a song and music video. The message-board-born concept of a “lolcow,” a gullible user who can be goaded into making a fool of themselves on a regular basis, definitely predated the music video. Even outside of dank subforums, internet denizens had laughed at unfortunate uploads of the “Star Wars Kid” and Britney Spears’ mega-defender Cara Cunningham.

Comedian Daniel Tosh even parlayed a desire to gawk at the web’s inept and unaware into a vicious update of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” that aired on Comedy Central for years. Still, the internet was a somewhat separate place from the real world in 2011 and the utopian glow of the web hadn’t quite been snuffed out completely when Black uploaded her viral-for-all-the-wrong-reasons music video to YouTube 15 years ago this week.

The song and music video – which, let us note, were written, storyboarded and shot by adults – are both bad, but not overwhelmingly so. The melody in the chorus shows a glimmer of hook-writing ability. The verses would be passable if not for the unremarkable “day in the life” lyrics. Overall, the song sounds like a recession-pop riff on Eddie Murphy’s bit about trying his own Richard Pryor-style stand-up as a child, when his only life experience was going to the bathroom.

A boost from the blog for Tosh’s show launched the video to infamy. The pile-on broke comment section containment, spreading into blogs, magazines and network TV talk shows. Catty media site “Gawker” noted that corners of the internet like 4Chan could be expected to respond with heinous pranks, without realizing how vile the rhetoric of regular people was about to get. The malevolent attention paid to Black’s stilted pop song reached levels no internet phenomenon had ever encountered..

Google ranked Black the fastest-rising search term of the entire year in 2011. (The only other people in the top five were then-murder suspect Casey Anthony and former “Jackass” star Ryan Dunn, who had died in a high-speed drunk-driving accident in June.) And when users found her ode to being excited for the weekend, they showered the teenager with hateful comments. Years before the digital shaming of people like Justine Sacco, Black bore the brunt of an unprecedented backlash.

“2011 wasn't necessarily even that long ago, but people didn't hold themselves to the responsibility they do now, and they definitely didn't hold other people responsible," Black told “Paper” in 2020. "[The internet] wasn't developed enough to maybe understand that every person has a real world and life behind that video. I don't think a lot of people realized how young I was. But in hindsight, I can't imagine anyone looking back and feeling good that they made fun of a 13-year-old.”

Online etiquette has shifted in the years since Black achieved infamy, and a single unknown artist is unlikely to reach universal derision in 2026, if only because ragebait is diffused across the structure of the current internet. Posts on Bluesky catalog fascist creep for an audience of suitably horrified liberals. On Elon Musk’s X, influencers like Libs of Tik Tok carry on in the spirit of 2011, tossing the supposedly “woke” antics of everyday people to an MAGA audience that’s suspiciously eager to get angry.

“Friday” is a relic of pop, of virality and of the way we once used the internet, but the impulses it revealed are now the predominant mode of online existence.

What do you think? Will the internet ever rally around a single object of scorn ever again? Should it? Sound off in the comments.

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