Spicy Boys

About

Spicy Boy is a nickname for fire ants proposed by Tumblr user essenceworm in March 2016. In July that same year, the name was widely spammed on Hillary Clinton’s Instagram posts.

Origin

On March 24th, 2016, Tumblr^[6] user essenceworm submitted a post suggesting to “rename ‘fire ants’ to ‘spicy boys’”. Within four months, the post gathered upwards of 138,000 notes.

Spread

In late June 2016, Change.org^[2] user pupperg launched a petition urging Michelle Obama, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg to “rename fire ants to spicy boys!” (shown below). Over the next month, the petition gained over 40,900 supporters.

“It’s 2016, there are 36 genders, bayblade might be a new olympic sport, why arent we calling fire ants ‘spicey boys’”

On July 1st, The @spicy_boys^[9] Twitter feed was launched.

On July 2nd, a Change.org^[7] petition titled “Spicy Boys Against The Daily Dot” was created, which accused The Daily Dot of “killing numerous good memes.” The following day, The Daily Dot^[8] published an article about the petitions.

On July 7th, the original Change.org^[7] petition reached the front page of the /r/ofcoursethatsathing^[3] and /r/NotTimeAndEric^[4] subreddits. Meanwhile, The Huffington Post^[11] published an article titled “It’s Time To Rename Fire Ants ‘Spicy Boys’.”

Spicy Boi

On July 17th, 2016, a 4chan user submitted a post urging viewers to “go on Hillary’s Instagram and spam Spicy Boy” (shown below).^[1]

On the following day, Redditor Effective Post submitted a post asking about the “spicy boi” spam comments on Clinton’s Instagram to the /r/OutOfTheLoop^[12] subreddit. On July 18th, Urban Dictionary^[13] user Spicy anon submitted an entry for “Spicy Boi,” defining it as “a text that has been said thousands of times under about every instagram photo Hillary Clinton has.”