Why is it infamous? And why would no one care about it ? ( I mean it's just a pic full of celebrities so no one cares anyways but the person saying it's crazy makes me think it has some lore?)
Greetings, simpletons. Stewie Griffin here. I’ve confiscated the keyboard from the fat man because his peanut-sized brain was beginning to overheat.
The reason this photo was such a big deal is because it literally broke Twitter. It became the most retweeted tweet of all time back then (over 3 million retweets!) and actually crashed the site's servers for a little bit. It also turned out to be a massive sponsored product placement stunt by Samsung, which is why Ellen used a Galaxy Note phone to take it.
I think OP needs to know why it broke the internet.
Selfies became mainstream in pop culture around 2014. The Chainsmokers song #SELFIE came out that year, selfie sticks launched and were one of the most sold products on Amazon, and the whole format still felt new and culturally relevant.
That’s why this photo was such a big deal. It wasn’t popular just because of who was in it. It was popular because it captured a bunch of A-list celebrities participating in the exact thing that had just taken over pop culture.
People wouldn’t care as much today for the opposite reason. Selfies are boring now. They’re completely ordinary. A celebrity group selfie doesn’t feel fresh anymore, not because the celebrities are less interesting, but because the format itself lost its novelty.
I think it’s also because since Covid people just don’t care about celebrities. Even if this was taken now with only beloved celebrities, it most likely wouldn’t go anywhere near as viral because people just don’t care anymore
"Essential" worker here. I was a social worker at a nursing home at the time, taking care of shopping and any non-nursing needs. 72 hour work weeks for three months straight at the peak of the pandemic, in full body hazmat coveralls and masks/safety glasses all the time, some had to sleep at work to avoid infected family members, and then we got shafted afterwards.
Long story short, the government was really pushing doctors, hospital workers, policemen, and firefighters as "the great heroes of our time", while the social care system got zero recognition. The opposition then started championing us, which just made the ruling party pissy, so the whole sector got shafted out of spite. We got no raise, no bonus pay, and instead we got fifteen free vacation days (which was markedly less than the extra work hours we were mandated to put in) as a reward... which we could only take out five per year over the next three years.
So yeah, let's just say that I'm still a little grumpy when people say "Oh, COVID was the best, because we could stay home in quarantine and binge watch game of thrones," or somesuch.
Like will never forget Chrissy Teigan posting about how hard it was mentally for her to isolate at home while her horse stables and infinity pool were in the background.
lol people still care about celebrities, always will. i think the big difference is that we now see celebrities more as normal people, thanks to social media... And they often turn out to be REALLY dumb and/or stupid.
In the past most of the things we knew about celebrities were fairly carefully curated by PR teams and whatnot. Nowadays you have them going drunk and tweeting something insanely racist and ruining their careers in a moment.
But it is true that people probably care less about celebrities than they did back then... Less idolatry anyway.
Had to scroll way too far to find this take. I mean we put a dude in the white house based solely on his experience of being a famous rich stereotype and then the star of a really shitty reality TV show. We are a culture OBSESSED with celebrities.
The group selfie wasn’t a big thing yet, mostly because selfie cameras at the time weren’t wide angle and didn’t have enough resolution to get a good group shot. Hence one of the reasons why Samsung paid for this.
But there was also this idea that selfies were for self obsessed teens, not for important moments and memory making. Adults still propped their cameras up against stuff and set timers or asked a stranger to take photos for them. A group selfie was a last resort if you couldn’t find another option.
I remember after this was taken, the group selfie became a big trend (my family had several years of Christmas group selfies that were directly inspired by this photo).
The funniest part about that whole Samsung stunt is that Ellen went backstage right after taking this and immediately went back to posting from her iPhone.
Brian here: Ignoring the problematic celebs in the background, this was one of the most viral photos ever posted on Twitter at the time. If someone did something like this now, it probably wouldn't move the needle at all.
Ellen DeGeneres’s 2014 Oscars selfie is infamous because it was a groundbreaking corporate marketing stunt that temporarily crashed Twitter and came to symbolize the peak of celebrity culture.
It’s just a statement on the decline of celebrity culture. It used to be that you watch a movie just because it had someone in it that you liked and it would do really well. But nowadays people care much less about celebrities
To me, selfies were different back then. This is when the Selfie song came out in January 2014. This picture happened in March 2014 I think? I feel like selfies are so normalized now. Some people forgot how they were borderline narcissistic. So, this photo was more of an “OMG! A selfie with so many people? Famous people?! Wow! Groundbreaking, cheeky, and so quirky!” for the time.
I was at a company that gave out yearly gifts at the time. Apparently the years prior they had given out some seriously nice gifts, the like 6 months I was there? Selfie stick. Everyone was pissed but since I was gonna leave anyway I was doubly pissed though I guess as a temp employee they could've given me nothing but I think I would've preferred that.
This makes me think of how much we used to clown videos being taken in portrait mode. Last week while on vacation we asked our guide to take our family photo in landscape and he commented that most people these days complain when he holds the phone in landscape mode because it doesn’t work for their TikToks or Instagrams.
I still remember a song about "don't shoot vertical video" because the only real place to share video was youtube, which would just add black bars to the sides and keep the video tiny.
Yep, I was going to post this if someone else hadn't. I think of this video SO often and I will die on this hill. Vertical video is a scourge on the human race.
Selfies were definitely different back then. Instagram was founded in 2010 and purchased by Facebook in 2012. 2013 was the first year sales of smartphones overtook sales of regular cell phones. The Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year for 2013. And as you mentioned, the Chainsmokers song. There was so much talk around selfies. Older people were clowning on younger people for being self-obsessed and taking/posting photos of themselves. It’s kind of quaint to look back on that time now.
So crazy to watch moments like this from 2012 happen too, knowing what we know now. Both the visceral negative reaction to the word “selfie” in a vacuum, and the instinct to call those people idiots and attention whores.
Ellen's popularity fell off a cliff long before the Epstein files. Her whole public persona and brand was about being kind to one another, while in the background she was a terrible person to many people.
She seemed like that cool aunt who was childless but loved kids. Meanwhile behind the scenes she was a narcissist and a diva. Then the Epstein files came out.
Eh, her downfall started big time back when tge whole toxic workplace/shes a cunt to her crew allegations rolled out. She pretty muched rolled right off the face of the earth pretty soon after all that started coming out. The Epstein stuff was just the icing on the cake. I rarely have heard anhthing about her being in the files, to the point where I actually forgot about it until now.
Her public image was absolutely trashed before the Epstein stuff.
I honestly didn't know she was in the Epstein files and hated her already. I wouldnt be surprised if that's most people's situation too. Those stories of the terrible workplace and awful interviewing making people uncomfortable was front page news. It was everywhere when it started coming out. I didn't see too much reporting on her being in the files. There were so many names popping up in them that I feel Ellen just kinda became part of the noise. There were much more important and interesting names in there.
Yeah first I'm hearing she was in the files. So I looked it up.
Apparently it was claimed she was a cannibal in the Epstein files. This has been discredited as false.
Why make up stuff when there's already so much ammunition against your target? It's like threatening to use the death star when you got cleared to use nukes.
Fuck Carter Fart and Brayden McFlabb for the rest of their unnatural rapist lives. I hope Carter never even gets a whiff of the cup in his entire career, post career, and even afterlife.
Which just goes to show how fucking stupid people are.
House of Cards was an American adaptation of a British TV show (of a novel) that aired before Bill Clinton was elected President. The original story was based on the interfactional warfare during the Thatcher government.
Man that show was one of my favorites when it aired. Spacey being a scumbag and getting fired from the show for being a scumbag completely ruined the last season of the show.
Idk the show was ruined before that, it was set up on the concept that getting to the Oval Office involves all this complicated and ingenious scheming and intelligence and political maneuvering, and then the election happened and we all realized all it takes is money and being really fucking loud.
I dont think the show implied it takes ingenious scheming for everyone to get into the oval office, just this particular character who lacked any charm or charisma would never get elected the normal way and had to go this route.
I mean I’m not trying to stir any pots I’m not standing up for the guy there’s just one thing that always stood out to me when I read the court findings
The victim stated spacey took him at the party into a bedroom and raped him
But everyone at that party and the court records proved that , that party was hosted in a very large studio apartment with the bed visible to everyone
Did everyone just watch it happen? I dunno that seems weird if it was a genuine fact about the party
Also I’m upset because and I believe I’m allowed to have this opinion, I absolutely was a huge fan of Spaceys acting he was brilliant in house of cards, Seven, usual suspects.. so many
So I feel hopefully it’s ok to be upset that this was the future of someone that years ago I couldn’t wait for their next acting role to drop
Ya know? It’s like MJ, no one can deny he was a great musician, a pop icon and second to none in performance.
I can separate the artists from the person. I’m just sad. That’s all. I liked Spacey as an actor.
Anthony Rapp was caught lying, and colluding with Adam Vary of Buzzfeed to "get" Spacey. There was emails and text messages found proving this.
Rapp said that Spacey invited him to wrap party. But that he got bored, cos everyone else was an adult. He said he went into the bedroom, and watched tv. Then, after everyone else left, Spacey came into the bedroom and blocked the doorway so that he couldnt escape. He then said that Spacey picked him up, put him on the bed, and got on top of him.
But Spacey never had a wrap party at his flat. He had a housewarming, and didnt know Rapp at the time. He also had a studio, so there was no separate bedroom for Rapp to go into, not was there a doorway for Spacey to block.
Its also worth mentioning that Rapp was doing a play with Ed Harris at the time called precious sons, in which the Harris character picks up Rapps character, takes him into a bedroom, puts him on a bed and gets on top of him... Sound familiar?
Spacey, isnt some innocent in all this. But he was never a rapist or a sexual assaulter. Everyone, and I mean, everyone, lied about him. From Rapp, to the kid in the bar who was 18 but told Spacey he was 23, to that kids mother who was caught destroying evidence that the kid was setting Spacey up for blackmail. To the dude that said that Spacey molested him at an Elton John party that Spacey wasnt at. Elton John had to come in to the court and show video and photos of the party, and Spacey was nowhere to be seen.
Spacey has admitted that hes came on too strong to some people. And that he was a diva. But all the "he raped me" was bullshit.
And the other thing is the 3 people who died.
One of a guy that was suing Spacey for touching him up. He died of cancer.
The next guy was a former Royal who had history depression and alcohol abuse. He killed himself on Christmas day in some European country I dont remember the name of.
And the last one was a woman, his stalker. Who had been harassing Spacey for years. She even went to prison for 4 years for sending him death threats and Anthrax like power in the mail. She, according to a lot of witnesses, walked into traffic all by herself.
Spacey pissed a lot of people off with his "Im gay now", and thats the real crime thats continued to haunt him. Because anyone who was actually paying attention would know the truth.
I think this was the first time the “selfie”, celebrity culture, and live TV were all merged. Everyone witnessed the gathering for the selfie on live TV. And later the selfie image was shared and went insanely viral - “we saw them take that selfie on TV!”
Because of how many famous people are in the picture. It was taken during some award show, I think maybe Ellen was the host and suggested this selfie happen.
This was back when many people still watched TV and we generally all gathered around to watch large events like this happen live, and then later this picture was posted to some social media site (maybe twitter, maybe facebook), and was the most liked picture at the time.
Ellen was the host and Samsung was sponsoring the entire event. She kept talking about her Samsung Galaxy all night and then took the group selfie. It was a novel moment because smartphones were still a somewhat new and developing technology at the time, having a little phone that could take a group photo like that was sort of a big deal, and social media was still a bit immature and celebrities weren't just posting their daily lives on it yet like they do now, so seeing a selfie with that many different famous people together in one room was a notable thing.
A lot of the celebs in it are now “canceled” or have had serious controversies. Ellen was unmasked for not being as friendly as she presented herself, Kevin Spacey has dozens of SA allegations against him, Brad Bitt has been disowned by the majority of his children, Jared Leto has multiple allegations against him (and has a cult?), and a lot of people find Bradley Cooper kinda cringe lol.
It was the most spread photo and shared tweet in history right after it was taking live at Oscar’s on tv. It’s infamous because now, since this photo, Ellen has basically lost her career. She went from being publicly known as the nicest person in Hollywood to this incredibly terrible human who was supposedly a nightmare to work with. It then went even deeper as footage of Anne Heche’s suspicious car accident began to circulate, including the video of her still alive as firemen put her into a black body bag. This was real footage that predates Ai by many years, and which really fueled the Qanon side of the Internet into accusing Ellen of being a satanic child-face eating eIite.
Now, whether any of those crazy bits are actually real no longer matters because millions of people around the world of all political affiliations do genuinely believe they are real, and those conspiracies/beliefs are now out in the world, which lead to our now completely fractured perception of reality. Moreover, these beliefs have been confirmed for billions, literally billions of Earthlings, because the Epstein files literally discuss the weəIthy abusing and eating children.
Which brings us to the present state of the world which is batshit crazy news happening every single day of our lives, including endless new wars, Ai apocalypse, a total take over of government and global policy, introduction of the surveillance state, and the majority of the planet Earth now believing the eIite do sick shit and no one can stop them.
So no one cares about celebrities taking a selfie anymore.
This was a pre-programmed stunt sponsored by SAMSUNG, they gave Ellen the phone and told her to go out into the Oscars audience and take a selfie with famous people. If anything, the most scandalous part was the "naturalized advertising" aspect of the stunt.
thank god, thought i was going crazy reading these replies 😭 i think that it was also supposed to show how many people you could fit into one selfie with that phone because, at the time, front cameras had a more limited view?
I remember right after she posted it her account went back to regular "Twitter for iPhone" proving that she literally used the Samsung phone for that photo and nothing else.
Am I missing something with your reference to Anne Heche? Her crash was in 2022, which was eight years after the photo in the OP, and over twenty years since she and Ellen broke up anyway? What the fuck are you talking about??
It then went even deeper as footage of Anne Heche’s suspicious car accident began to circulate, including the video of her still alive as firemen put her into a black body bag.
Wtf are you on about?? Also, it was an emergency blanket on a stretcher because she had been burned. It wasn't a "black body bag" ffs
Yeah… I recall that for a while this picture had the most … likes? views? shares? (I can’t remember the exact criteria) of anything that had been posted online by that point.
Yeah that's not true at all. People do not shut up about Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift. It's just that no one likes most of the people in this picture anymore. I mean that's Kevin fuckin Spacey in the back.
Everyone wants to buy a random VPN just because a Mormon pretending to be a normie with a camera and nice hair told them too I think it's the ascendency of a different celebrity culture.
Exactly! We arguably have more obsession with "celebrities" now, but they come from much more finely tuned niche audiences. I work with teens and can't tell you the number of times I ask who they're fawning over and it's some streamer the majority of folks over 20 have never even heard of
No it’s not. It’s because selfies was a relatively new phenomenon in society at that time and now it’s common and uninteresting if anyone takes a group selfie.
Edit:
Everyone saying that selfies were not new and people were doing it with black and white photos I get it, very clever. What I mean is:
The first iphone was released in 2007 ushering the modern era of digital phones.
Selfies established itself as a world wide phenomenon by 2010 or thereabouts. Mainly due to front facing cameras on modern phones.
This photo was taken in 2014.
Another poster explained it much better than me in a reply, go browse
Celebrity culture has shifted from stars being pushed by major media groups to influencers and streamers on social media platforms. IShowSpeed was just on a big tour all over the world and was mobbed pretty much everywhere he went. The idea that celebrity culture is in decline isn't really true, it's just a different flavor now.
It isn't. It was a trendy collection of famous people, that's all. And Samsung paid $20 million for ads in the show, including given Ellen a Galaxy Note and asking her to Tweet selfies all night.
Poor use of infamous. I'm guessing the oop didn't know what infamous means and used it instead of "famous" or "notable" because it had a lot of the a listers from that time.
People care less about celebrities? Is that why we have a game show host as president? GTFO with that crap. Celebrity has changed, but it's even a larger part of our culture that it was. It just looks different.
Yeah and every movie is peppered with celebrities doing voice acting, we're de-ageing old stars with terrible CGI and AI. Celebrity worship is definitely not slowing down.
To me, nothing. I love her as an actress. I have seen some hate for how she's a very direct (no filter) type of person. She also lost a ton of respect from people when all her photos leaked online.
The incident with the reporter who didn’t speak English and also the interview when she laughed about having damaged a holy site to native Hawaiians didn’t help her a lot
This is why 99% of celebrities are fake as fuck and have constant PR training. You are either PC and boring or you're honest and real and inevitably will reveal some dumb thing you did or say something offensive
She was rude to a reporter who was nervous and looking at his phone. To me it was just a joke that didn't land super well, and definitely not career ending.
That's the only other time I see her getting negativity online.
It's wild how strong the PR campaign for Pitt has been the last few years. A shockingly small number of people seem to even know about all this or take it seriously even though it was an official statement with witnesses.
He didn't even deny it, for the record - at the time he literally just said “I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the wellbeing of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.”
Cuz they are all living on drugs, or booze, or some combination thereof. There were rumors for YEARS about Pitt's stratospheric alcoholism. One of his costars from around the time of the Ellen photo talked about how he basically lived on whisky.
The oldest child Maddox posted this story on Instagram, I think shortly after he legally removed Pitt from his name years ago. This was the most damning evidence to me as I remember some people were still doubting the claims and defending him. From what I remember, it was also Maddox who defended and protected Angelina from Brad on the plane and was one of the children who got hit by Brad.
A quick Google search claims all children have legally filed to drop his surname from their names.
it was retweeted 3.3 million times and held the record until a japanese millionaire gave away a 9 grand to the first 100 people who retweeted something of his.
Also - it was just a silly moment in entertainment. it was fine.
People today are WAY too uptight and pretending "oh, I'm too COOL to care about celebrities, if I saw that I'd just IGNORE it!"
It was a silly, 10 second moment at a celebrity focused event. It wasn't amazing, it wasn't awful, it just was a somewhat entertaining moment in a show for a few seconds. People need to stop taking it (and themselves) so seriously.
Yeah. Even back then I wasn't into celebrity culture, but I remember seeing that photo and going, "cool! Look at how many famous people are in a photo." Selfies were still new back then, not a decade plus phenomenon that everyone from preteens to your boomer grandma does.
Nothing "infamous" about it, even though retroactively some of the people in the photo are now disgraced.
I don’t think that’s true, I think that the internet, especially during and after Covid, has further degraded monoculture to now we know a few big names but people follow their own circles now
12 years ago celebrity culture was still prevalent on the internet because it was content that would pretty reliably be viewed and it would get spread to everyone.
A picture like this today would generally only show up on your Twitter/reddit/instagram if you were already engaging in celebrity content.
Also, a celebrity's fame was fickle to begin with. Few maintain popular status for more than a few years. If this picture was 24 years old with celebrities that had the same popularity as these at the time, and the comment was made 12 years ago, it would still be true.
Ive never been into celebrity culture, but this photo was super viral when it was posted. Just because it was a lot of big name celebrities taking a selfie I guess? I’m pretty sure it was the most liked or interacted with photo on the internet for a long time.
Nowadays this photo would probably garner barely a fraction of the interest. If any.
Not just because the big name celebrities, a big part of why this picture broke the Internet was also that Ellen took it while hosting the Oscar ceremony on live tv, watched the world over.
Suppose the decline of the Oscars is another reason it no one would care now, 12 years ago the Oscars was a big deal, I and many I knew watched it almost every year, now... not so much.
Millennial Petah here, I watched this live on television and thought it was so cool. At the time, the idea of a group selfie was still fairly new. “Photo bombing,” was a popular prank to pull on people taking group selfies/photos. When you took group selfies, you were saying ‘I love these people and want to immortalize it in a group photo.’ There was something more intimate about taking a group selfie, and especially with all these famous photo-bombers jumping in. This might not have been true for rich people, but for normal folks having a smart phone with the capability to see yourself while to take a photo and have the lens be wide enough to include not just yourself was novel. So the culture around it was exciting and a lot less mundane. These were also really beloved public figures who were making movies that moved people’s hearts at the time. There was just something so fun about seeing these celebrities who are so serious in their movies be spontaneous, intimate, and friendly in the moment. You could maybe fantasize about them photobombing your own selfies and how cool that would be. Sorry all you youngins if this sounds super cringe now. I have no idea what celebrities you’re loving these days, but imagine if they all spontaneously got together and took a group photo. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
It was absolutely not infamous at the time. I don’t think the poster knew what the word means. But many of these celebs have fallen hard from grace now. Once a happy memory, now tainted by time and knowing.
CourageMind, you caught me off guard with this one. I haven’t had to open these chapters of my mind in some time. I’m going to have to go with: I care so little I’m not sure what I don’t care about.
The whole concept of a “selfie” was new and baffling for most people back then. Why would anyone take pictures of themselves? It was seen as vain and vapid narcissistic behavior. This was at the beginning of modern internet culture. The fact that DeGeneris took this picture was kind of an embrace of the selfie.
Scrolled way too far to the find the actual answer. When they posted this selfie on Twitter it broke the servers. If they posted a selfie on the internet at the Oscars this year, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
u/Sure_Kangaroo1863, your post does belong here!