Meet the WannaBeasts of local TikTok

—by Lester Feder

When Ryan announced the launch of Garbage Day Media Intelligence last year, he called it “A More Buttoned Up Version of Garbage Day.” I hated that — we’re doing more of what Garbage Day does best, not less. But I also wouldn't let him call it “Garbage Intelligence.” Our readers might like that, but we needed their bosses to take us seriously too. So maybe Garbage Day Media Intelligence, or GDMI, is more buttoned-up, or at least I am.

A lot of you expressed interest in GDMI in our year-end survey, and we’re playing with some new features to share more with you. If you’d like to be on that list, please hit “Yes, please!” on the form below.

Ryan is letting me to do a GDMI takeover of the newsletter today, I hope you don’t mind. We want to share a bit about what we’ve been working on.

Advocacy organizations, marketing firms, and companies have been bugging Ryan for years to help them make sense of the internet. And we know our tools, our reporting, and our research can do that. But explaining what we can offer has been a bit of a challenge.

We don’t do “social listening” — it’s closer to cultural interpretation. We give you the tools to understand online communities from their members’ perspective so that you can engage authentically in the spaces you need to reach. We we can tell you how and why things are taking off, not just give you a lot of numbers like a dashboard service. We've been surprising even ourselves with what we've turned up so far for our first clients. Here’s an example:

A progressive organization recently asked us to analyze the social media landscape for key demographics in a major 2026 Senate race. The organization asked not to be identified because research is ongoing, but they’re cool with us sharing a few things. They wanted us to find new ways to connect with less politically engaged young men in the online spaces where they were already gathering. 

We discovered that custom car content in the state was huge: Videos of illegal burnouts, exotic car rentals, local brands paying meme accounts to use cars to promote their work, and meetups where car enthusiasts meet IRL. This gave our client the tools to engage users around their passion and refine their messaging to connect with how hard these voters were hustling to climb the ladder. And we quickly discovered a whole universe that the custom car content existed alongside, including aspiring hip-hop stars, MrBeast wannabes (more on that in a sec), sports betting, and even cowboys.

Our research not only supports the work of digital strategy teams and influencer outreach, but also paid advertising programs, message development, and old-fashioned organizing. Just like here in the newsletter, we map channels through which ideas move. We won’t promise we can help you go viral, but we can reveal the mechanics of what takes off online — the relationships between platforms, key accounts, posting formats, algorithms, etc. 

Like I said, we don’t do dashboards, or “sentiment analysis,” or metrics that are increasingly meaningless as platforms manipulate engagement data. We examine the internet like humans, not statisticians or robots. We get to know online communities the same way users do — by following accounts and expanding our networks post by post. Our researcher Ellie Hall first developed this technique — which we call “Spiderwebbing” — to do OSINT research on ISIS. Unlike automated platforms, our manual approach allows us to see in real time how the algorithm is shaping what users see. And our researchers can give you the context to make sense of raw information.  

The line between "online" and "offline" stopped meaning anything a long time ago. The internet isn't a place people visit anymore; it's the channel through which all culture moves. If you need to reach people, understand a community, or figure out why something is happening, we can help. Email me at [email protected].

During our short-time in the consulting world we’ve learned that “Business People” love “Making Deals Over Drinks.” So to celebrate the launch of GDMI, we’re taking over the Whiskey Cellar NYC in Manhattan on February 18th. We’ll try and keep the speeches to a minimum. You can RSVP by clicking the button below.

—by Kyle Fitzpatrick

Hi, I’m Kyle, I write a newsletter called The Trend Report and I’m one of the researchers working with GDMI. For the last few months, I’ve been deep in Normal Dude Internet. As Lester wrote above, we were asked to answer one of the hottest questions for political campaigns right now right now: What the hell are young men doing on the internet? In our case, we were specifically looking at TikTok.

What we discovered surprised us, but also made total sense. The biggest creators we came across weren’t local copies of Charlie Kirk or Nick Fuentes, thankfully, but closer to a million specialized MrBeasts. They were a group of users we dubbed “WannaBeasts.” Not-quite-influencers that all ran small businesses — barbers, tattoo artists, and photographers. Most of them working in what you might call the “looksmaxxing” professions.

For years, we’ve heard that the influencer would be toppled by the nano-influencer and the micro-influencer and, at least on TikTok, that does seem to be the case. In the barber world, we discovered mega-creator Vic Blends. For tattoo artists, there was a show-and-tell culture that’s so powerful that someone drove ten hours for a session. And for photographers, they’ve basically become documentarians for normies, as evidenced by the trend of birthday photo shoots.

Celebrity barber Vic Blends, real name Victor Antonio Fontanez, was the real standout for us. With nearly 16 million followers on TikTok, Fontanez has an extraordinary reach among young male voters. He first built his brand with “feel good” videos, like cutting the hair of strangers for free, and more recently made videos with everyone from Barack Obama to 21 Savage.

His stuff is cute with a religious-meets-boostraps bent. He recently remodeled his local childhood basketball court and hosts community service events in his hometown. But it turns out Fontanez is only the tip of the iceberg. His videos have become an entire meta unto themselves. We discovered tons of other small creators, like @ali_labarber and @cyristb, cribbing his big viral format right now — casual interviews with customers, usually about where someone is from, as they get their hair cut. 

For us, the lesson here is less about wholesome masculinity — or the surprising popularity of looksmaxxing — but how the economic realities of America feel right now. Social media is the only place left where you can find, at the very least, the feeling of upward mobility. The WannaBeasts are selling their services to young men, promising to help them look good and feel good. Even if it’s all tied to building their own businesses in the process. 

A little pyramid schemey? Sure, but the internet has turned every gendered space online into some kind of MLM at this point. Optics and ethics aside, it’s clear that the best way to reach small town dudes right now is to meet them at the bank and promise a path forward: Become MrBeast, or look good trying.

—by Adam Bumas

The response to ICE’s ongoing deadly occupation of Minnesota has spread both IRL and online. This week, after the murder of Alex Pretti, it’s completely taken over Reddit. Everywhere from r/catbongos to r/CrossStitch have had anti-ICE posts break into r/all, the central feed for the site’s most popular post. It’s being treated by sources as big as the Washington Post as a shift in a mostly apolitical community. Thanks to the data we’ve been collecting every month for GDMI, though, we know better. Reddit, on the whole, has been staunchly against Trump and his regime for years. 

Since we started keeping records in early 2023, r/all posts discussing Trump and his administration have exclusively been negative. In fact, since Trump’s second term began a year ago, the site’s most-upvoted post of the month has been anti-Trump five different times. That trend started immediately, since the most popular post of January 2025, from r/pics, was titled “Elon musk doing a nazi salute at the White House. Unreal”. 

The most popular posts on Reddit aren’t always political — throughout all of 2025, the Reddit post with the most upvotes was a user proudly sharing that they successfully defended their PhD thesis. But the response to Minnesota isn’t the first time Reddit’s most popular posts have stood united in anti-Trump sentiment. In March, after Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, three of the top five posts on r/all were directly criticizing the Trump administration. A few months later, after the first No Kings protest, seven of the top 20 posts in June were positive posts about the protests.

The trend didn’t start with Trump’s reelection either. Going back in our records, the closest thing to a pro-Trump post we can find at the top of r/all is his 2023 mugshot, also from r/pics, where the post presented it neutrally and the comments were mostly — though not completely — anti-Trump. Which suggests there has been a shift away from Trump among Reddit users, but not a sudden one at all. 

What set the stage for this uprising? For a start, multiple subreddits were temporarily banned last year after making negative posts about DOGE and Elon Musk. The Verge later reported this was thanks to personal meetings between Musk and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Huffman has had a contentious relationship with Reddit’s most dedicated users, most notably causing protests and blackouts in 2023 when he paywalled the site’s API, effectively shutting down a huge number of popular third-party programs. 

Regular Reddit users, even if they don’t live in the US, have been marinating in this anti-authoritarian culture for years. That also explains the site’s other most universal political opinion: Luigi Mangione is loved on Reddit as much as Trump is hated.

But beyond that, even casual Reddit users are used to decisions about politics or AI from the site’s thousands of semi-independent subreddits. This is why the Reddit protests against Trump and ICE have been so rapid and universal. Unlike the rest of the internet, Reddit communities are organized, kind of like Minnesota neighborhoods. And they’re reacting to coordinated threats in a similar way.

P.S. here’s a good Bluesky post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***