Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The rapid rise of the Twitter account Accidentally Based surprised even the person who created it. One of many so-called gimmick accounts, Accidentally Based was started as a left-wing response to conservative meme accounts that the creator noticed tended to grow quickly. Just a month after making Accidentally Based, the account had 100,000 followers, the owner estimates, and was getting retweeted by Twitter users with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. What began as an experiment soon proved to be a reliable way to get content in front of millions.
“I figured it was worth a shot, and maybe I’d be able to have some influence on the left,” the account creator says about starting Accidentally Based. “It didn’t feel like there…
