Source: The Verge and Vanity Fair

Battle of the Babies

By: Nate Unger and Kinley DuRant

What to Know:

Since November 12, 2019, Baby Yoda has taken the internet by storm with memes, comments and posts. As of February 2^, 2020, a competitor has emerged against this internet sensation. Baby nut, the little version of the iconic Mr. Peanut of the Planters Peanut company, was born.

Here is some of the info:

• Number of Baby Yoda tweets in the week following its release (1/12/2019-11/19/2019) soared to 227.1K
  • Peak of 64.8K on November 16^th.
• Number of Baby Nut tweets in the week following its release (2/2/2020-Present) was 80.9k
  • Peak of 38.2k on February 3^rd.
• Total Number of Baby Yoda tweets since mainstream release (11/12/2019-Present) – 5.5 million, with peaks on Sunday, December 1^st, 2019
  • Several of the big spikes include:
    • 2k tweets, Monday, December 30^th, 2019
    • 9k tweets, due to release of Rise of Skywalker
    • 3k tweets, due to release of “competitor” Baby Nut, on Monday, February 3^rd, 2020
  • Total Number of Baby Nut tweets since mainstream release (2/2/2020-Present) is around 209.8K

This trend lasted for a few short weeks and the meme account for Baby Nut was shut down. Twitter recently removed 3 accounts created by Planters in an effort to spread memes, a violation of Twitter’s rules and conduct.According to Insider, the Mr. Peanut Twitter account was attempting to build clout by replicating real accounts.  They stated that “coordinated activity, that attempts to artificially influence conversations through the use of multiple accounts, fake accounts, automation and/or scripting,” and “operating multiple accounts with overlapping use cases, such as identical or similar personas or substantially similar content.” (Insider)

Based on this information, it is noticeable that Baby Yoda is a much hotter commodity than his counterpart, Baby Nut. Along with the release of the ninth installment in the Star Wars saga, Yoda got much more attention and is more culturally accepted than Baby Nut. People swooned over Baby Yoda, making him into memes to represent relatable experiences in addition to making fan accounts to post updates as new episodes of his show, The Mandalorian.

Baby Yoda trend:

Baby Nut came out a few months later to a bit of a mixed reception. On one end, people love the cute factor that came with its arrival, similar to that of Baby Yoda. However, people are turning down the notion of Baby Nut in favor of his counterpart, Baby Yoda.

Baby Nut trend: