Milkshake Duck
In Internet culture, a Milkshake Duck is a person who gains popularity on social media for some positive or charming trait but is later revealed to have a distasteful history or to engage in offensive behavior.[1][2][3][4] The term has been connected to cancel culture, a perceived trend of call-out culture on social media, sometimes resulting in celebrities being ostracized and careers abruptly derailed by publicized misconduct.[5][6]
The phrase is derived from a Twitter post made on 12 June 2016 by Ben Ward, an Australian cartoonist using the online handle "pixelatedboat".[7] His Twitter joke describes a fictional Internet viral phenomenon of a "lovely duck that drinks milkshakes" which is then immediately discovered to be racist. Ward stated the joke was partially influenced by the Chewbacca Mask Lady.[8][9][10]
Related concepts[edit]
A related concept to "milkshake duck" is that of the "problematic fave", a phrase originating on Tumblr,[22] describing a notable and popular person who, despite recent offensive or harmful statements or actions, manages to retain their popularity.[29] Ward was imitating how social media would find dark secrets of public faces who were seemingly decent people which keys the idea that there is something nice about them, but the image is dirtied and they now are seen as problematic.[22] Entrepreneur Elon Musk has been described as a "problematic fave" following his calling one of the Thai cave rescuers a "pedo guy", apparently referencing the prominence of child sex tourism and child prostitution in Thailand, in response to criticism from Vern Unsworth, a Westerner in Thailand.[30]
Polygon writer Julia Alexander argued that terms like "milkshake duck" and "problematic fave" are symptoms of current cultural conflict on the Internet in which users are ready to be outraged and have the ability to search a person's public Internet history to find statements to support that. Alexander suggested that to avoid these labels, one should not worry about what statements they may have made, but whether they show awareness that they made them and that they have grown past or changed away from them.[30]
In dictionaries[edit]
In December 2017, the phrase was a runner-up in Oxford Dictionaries' "word of the year", losing out to "youthquake".[3] In January 2018, Australia's Macquarie Dictionary named "milkshake duck" its 2017 "word of the year".[31]
The phrase was added to Dictionary.com and described as "a person (or thing) who becomes extremely popular on the internet for some positive reason, but as their popularity takes off and people dig into their past, they quickly become an object of outrage and hatred."[32]