#BroomChallenge

People took to all forms of social media to take part in the #broomchallenge on February 10th. Apparently NASA released a statement that claimed that because of the moon and gravitational pull, household brooms would stand up on their own today. Although the original statement from NASA has not been located, people took to social media posting videos all across TikTok, Instagram stories, Facebook and Snapchat Stories. The hashtags #BroomChallenge and #NASA were trending on Twitter all day with tens of thousands of tweets for each phrase. 

This challenge went viral for many reasons but we can take a closer look at the STEPPS theory to understand why. The social currency behind this challenge was that you were a part of a special phenomenon and “hip” enough to have participated in it, posting a reaction video or picture it to friends and family. A trigger for this was taking to Twitter and using the hashtags that went along with it. Thanks to the hashtags and so called “announcement” from NASA, many people will most likely associate this challenge when thinking about NASA now as a “remember when?” sort of thing. 

With any sort of challenge the emotion behind it draws people to participate. In the case of the broom challenge, it was joy and shock that came when it actually worked. But of course with this, who just takes the video to keep for themselves? Anyone who participated took to social media to share their reaction and success OR fail publicly, using social proof to prove that it either worked (in most cases) or didn’t. There was not much practical value in this challenge besides the fact that some people may have been more inclined to read up on the moon and its effect on gravity, causing the broom to do what apparently it can only do today.

It will be interesting to see what type of stories come out in the next week from this challenge. My prediction is that sales of popular broom brands will rise and Google searches for NASA will increase.

In my own findings, people began to take the challenge to another level and make jokes about this challenge, doing headstands saying “its works on humans too”, and photos of eggs balancing with the same sort of caption.

Now whether this challenge is a hoax and household broom stands up on its own everyday, is something we won’t know until the morning. But what we know for sure is that on February 10th, people were pulling their brooms out of their closets and standing them up… some hopefully going the step further and actually using it to tidy up.