THERE’S A WONDERFUL irony to the fact that a strange localised Dublin phenomenon went viral over the past few days, in the same week that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was announcing sweeping changes on the company’s platforms.
Zuckerberg’s announcement last Tuesday saw him merrily rolling back on a lot of the content moderation and fact-checking that had been put in place to make his users’ lives better.
A collective groan went up in the parts of society where people care about things like ‘not being subjected to toxic behaviour online’ and ‘misinformation’. In other places, many of which contained people who are imbued with much political power, there was celebration.
Meanwhile, a small bridge in the Dublin village of Drumcondra became a beacon of joyful silliness thanks to some abandoned vegetables, earning the moniker ‘Cherry Tomato Bridge’.
It was a strange turn of events, showing us the sort of positive virality that we last saw during Covid and which blossomed during pre-Musk, pre-Trump social media.
So why did it happen, and what can Cherry Tomato Bridge tell us about social media as we creep into 2025?
To those who are uninitiated, on 9 January, two TikTok users – author Sarah Maria Griffin and writer Kelly Earley - spotted that someone had scattered cherry tomatoes on Drumcondra Bridge.
They each approached the bizarre sight differently.
Griffin’s video had a beautiful eeriness to it, the cherry tomatoes glistening with frost during the recent cold snap (she joked about trying to stop herself from eating the frozen toms).
Earley, meanwhile, jokingly offered up the bridge as a ‘thing to do in Dublin’. (It won’t have escaped some people’s notice that Earley was one of the great young journalists who wrote for The Daily Edge, The Journal’s now-defunct sister site which specialised in spotting viral moments).
Soon their videos and subsequent Instagram and TikTok posts had garnered a lot of views, and people began making pilgrimages to the bridge. Some visitors added more tomatoes, someone put the bridge on to Google Maps, and within a day or so the phenomenon had legitimately gone viral.
That the videos went viral is itself one of social media’s mysteries. No one is quite sure how it happened, given that users have little insight into how TikTok and Instagram algorithms work.
Perhaps it was just a quirk of the platforms that led their posts to reach many eyes, and that the weird content then grabbed the attention of users who saw the chance to have a bit of craic.
But the fact that, to date, millions of people have viewed Griffin’s and Earley’s videos shows that Cherry Tomato Bridge’s blend of surrealism, hyper-locality and in-joke absurdity struck a particular chord.
That this happened in the same week that Meta’s new fact-checking policy was announced might have made its appeal even more obvious.
This isn’t just some silly viral happening; it’s an insight into how much social media has changed, and how people are seeking out silliness as platforms feel like less welcoming places.
There’s an online joke that after David Bowie died in 2016, the world started to slide off its axis.
From Brexit, Trump, social media drama in the form of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and numerous other incidents, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, there’s no need to explain why this wild theory began.
Meanwhile, tech’s most powerful men had to grapple with the misinformation and toxic behaviour that went hand-in-hand with all of these things on the social media platforms they created.
The world’s geopolitical incidents didn’t cause social media’s downfall, and the platforms will say they didn’t set out to become the ideal places for misinformation to flourish.
But the tech powers-that-be didn’t stop to think about how their platforms could foment dodgy behaviour until it was too late.
From the mid-2010s onwards, the impact of this behaviour could no longer be ignored and platforms attempted to remedy things by introducing more content moderation. They ended up firefighting issues as they went.
At the same time, more people recognised the impossibility of perfect content moderation, and worked to exploit these platforms’ vulnerabilities.
Add in the rise of the right, rhetoric around ‘fake news’ and distrust of the media, ‘culture wars’ breaking out left, right and centre, and we got the perfect storm for social media to become an uncomfortable and unfriendly place for a lot of people.
Then, in late 2022, Elon Musk took over Twitter, changed its name to X and introduced a raft of changes to allow more ‘free speech’ on the platform.
That led to a huge change in its tone. Many longtime users jumped ship, unhappy with the new, arguably less friendly, world of X.
Between these things happening and complaints about how Google search had changed, the phrase ‘enshittification’ was coined to sum up how everything felt like it was going down the proverbial digital toilet.
And then we got Cherry Tomato Bridge. There are a few reasons why it’s significant that Cherry Tomato Bridge’s virality coincided with Meta’s change of policy.
For starters, it was a genuinely viral moment that was utterly weird but wholesome, and which had a distinctly Irish feel.
It had real life connections and didn’t exist solely on the internet. It was the sort of zany, community-based internet moment we hadn’t seen in a long time, and which Meta’s policy could potentially be the death knell for.
Secondly, people are nostalgic for the social media of old. They know that Meta’s policy changes are not going to return social media to how it was. Instead, they fear it will make things even more fractured.
Anyone who was around in the early 2010s during the heyday of ‘Irish Twitter’ will remember how potent that particular site was in gathering people together.
It felt communal, and for a long time you could go on social media and feel part of one giant conversation.
That was particularly the case with Twitter, which seemed like where all of human life existed, from the banal to the significant. Even the silly things on there seemed to matter, and because of the way it worked and the attention the media paid to it, strange things could easily go viral.
It was also a place where the good could bob along next to the bad, where you could ignore the shite talkers and focus instead on the chats about standout kids on the Toy Show, or Rose of Tralee, or the man who slipped on ice. Social media and real life could easily intersect.
For Kelly Earley, the sweet spot with Cherry Tomato Bridge was how it augmented “real life experiences”, like when a night out would be immortalised via photos posted on Bebo, or how Twitter meetups helped real life and online lives coalesce in a tangible way.
“It’s the first time we’ve seen something like this in ages,” Earley told The Journal. “Since Covid, really. And Covid was a time where people had to pause and stop, look at the world around them, their family and friends, the people in their lives, and lean into the internet more to enhance their connections with the real world.”
She also noted how much social media feeds and algorithms have changed since the early 2010s.
“You go on Instagram and your whole feed is clogged up with marketing content. How much of that do you have to scroll through before you find someone you know? I don’t look through the feed, I scroll through Instagram stories,” she said.
“The bridge has given people something hyperlocal that they can go visit in real life, talk about with their friends, meet people and talk to people at,” said Earley.
She spent some time at the bridge over last week, meeting locals and tourists who all visited after reading about it online.
She noticed that a lot of the visitors she met were queer or trans, which is significant given that Meta’s policy changes will likely affect this grouping in particular.
Cherry Tomato Bridge was embraced because it gave people a shared sense of belonging both on and offline, says Earley, adding: “The internet is increasingly moving in a way where that’s not possible at all.”
These days, although there is some cross-pollination between platforms, social media is a world that can be siloed. TikTok, while absolutely massive as a platform, has its own algorithm which makes virality a guessing game.
Instagram is built around ‘bubbles’ of communities, which makes it welcoming but not primed for virality. Twitter no longer has the same cachet as before.
Plus, there is a growing suspicion and weariness around social media platforms and their owners. Hence why the new-ish platform Bluesky has seen its user numbers rocket.
Things have changed, but Cherry Tomato Bridge showed that when given the opportunity, people will jump on the chance to connect real life with social media.
What Cherry Tomato Bridge also showed was that there’s an appetite for silliness out there. People want frivolity. The idea of a ‘Cherry Tomato Bridge’ was absurd and surreal, and a respite from a world that seems to be getting grimmer by the month.
“My real feeling about it is that I am always so moved when a joke grows to this extent,” Sarah Maria Griffin told The Journal.
“People need silliness: next Monday is Blue Monday, Januaries are always hard. I think the surrealism really lifted people up, and brought them together during a cold, bleak time.”
You could embrace Cherry Tomato Bridge. You could laugh at it, or be confused by it. And indeed, you could take it at face value: it was, after all, just a bunch of tomatoes on a bridge.
Soon, it will likely reach that inevitable point in virality where newcomers take it too far.
The scene at the bridge has changed day by day, and when The Journal visited on Monday afternoon, there was a handful of tomatoes, some words smeared in tomato paste, and (bafflingly) holy water.
By Monday evening, the tomatoes had supposedly been removed.
But perhaps a slide into obscurity is part of the natural lifecycle of any social media phenomenon, from ‘what colour is the dress?’ to Pizza Rat.
We just have to remember the good times – and maybe that’s the point of this all.
Cherry Tomato Bridge was a short and sweet rallying call for social media silliness, a brief glimpse of a world where community could form out of an unlikely thing. If it happened this time, perhaps it could happen again…?
So, to whoever abandoned those cherry tomatoes on a freezing bridge, we salute you (though maybe use a bin next time). You didn’t realise that this small action would end up telling Ireland so much about its internet past – and show us that the future of social media might not be as terrible as we suspect. Well, maybe.
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