Another piece of internet history is gone, perhaps forever, after the creator of the viral “Damn Daniel” video, Josh Holz, had his Twitter account hacked on Monday.
Holz, 15, posted a video to Twitter of his friend Daniel Lara, 14, wearing a variety of shoes (don’t ask) on 15 February. The video, a collection of clips of Holz exclaiming “Damn, Daniel”, was also uploaded to YouTube at the same time. That version of the video remains live.
In the weeks since, the Twitter video received hundreds of thousands of retweets and millions of views.
The success brought Holz and Lara immediate fame, including an appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show and an article focusing on the video in the New York Times.
But fame, as ever, has a dark side: the video brought Holz unwanted attention from an unknown attacker, who eventually succeeded in gaining control of his Twitter account, which has 164,000 followers. The assailant then posted racist videos to Holz’s feed – and deleted the original tweet containing the Damn Daniel video.
So uhh, it seems the account (@Josholzz) that posted the Damn Daniel video has been hacked pic.twitter.com/0Sv0nB2JzB
— Ned Donovan (@Ned_Donovan) February 28, 2016
By Monday morning, Holz had regained control of his account, posting that “they’re are some really sick people out there and I’m sorry you guys had to see all that.”
got my account back. they're are some really sick people out there and I'm sorry you guys had to see all that.
— josh (@Josholzz) February 29, 2016
But the video, and all of his previous tweets, remain deleted, prompting him to post #getthevideoback shortly after.
It isn’t the first time a piece of internet history has proven surprisingly ephemeral. 2015’s Dress, probably the most widely-shared viral image ever, originated in a tumblr post which was deleted a few months after it went viral.
That had ramifications: the Buzzfeed post that propelled the image worldwide, and went on to become that site’s most-read piece ever, spent most of 2015 as an unreadable collection of broken embed links, before eventually being fixed in December with a direct upload of the image in question.
