Facebook’s #10Yearchallenge Meme Takes Over the Internet

Facebook users woke up after New Year’s to yet another viral meme: the 10-Year Challenge. Also known as the 2009 vs. 2019 Challenge, the so-called challenge follows a pretty simple premise: people post a photo of themselves in 2009 next to one from 2019 to showcase their evolution/glow-up. Attracting countless social media, brands and celebrities like Reese Witherspoon and Nicky Minaj, the challenge was not confined to Facebook but spread to every other social network, namely Twitter and Instagram. The rise of the meme conversely reignited the debate about personal data among experts and the media, as some speculated the challenge to be part of Facebook’s efforts to perfect its face-recognition software while others refuted the claim using the previous availability of the data as an argument. “People don’t reliably upload pictures in chronological order, and it’s not uncommon for users to post pictures of something other than themselves as a profile picture,” Kate O’neil wrote in a viral Wired article addressing this particular argument. “In other words, it would help if you had a clean, simple, helpfully labeled set of then-and-now photos.”