The Week a Baby Monkey Went More Viral Than the Epstein Files

This week the internet cried over a monkey, canonized a dying actor, and somehow fit Obama's alien confirmation and the Epstein files into the same news cycle. Below, everything worth knowing from the past seven days of social — what happened, why it spread, and what to take from it.

🐒 Move Over, Moo Deng

There is a new viral zoo animal with whom the internet is collectively enamored. His name is Punch. He's a baby macaque at Ichikawa Zoo in Japan, abandoned by his mother at birth, left to carry a stuffed orangutan toy as his only companion, and routinely bullied by the older monkeys in his enclosure. He does not need this. Neither does the internet — and yet.

Creators across Instagram and TikTok spent the week posting updates on Punch like he was a family member in the ICU. People filmed themselves crying. People declared they were booking flights to Japan. The emotional intensity was, by any measure, extraordinary — average engagement on Punch content was among the highest of any story this week, full stop.

The reason it worked isn't mysterious: this is a full narrative arc compressed into short clips. Abandonment, suffering, and (eventually) acceptance by the troop. The internet processed all three stages in real time, which is why the story lasted days instead of hours. The early spread was entirely grassroots — mega creators joined late, after it was already everywhere. Watch for more animal welfare narratives built on this arc. The template is now very much proven.

🎬 A Final Message

Actor Eric Dane died from ALS this week at 53. He knew it was coming. Before he went, he recorded a message for his daughters, handed it to Netflix for a special called Famous Last Words, and asked them to save it.

The clip — Dane speaking directly to his daughters about living in the present, about what his illness taught him, about the moments that mattered — is now everywhere. Viola Davis shared it. Maria Shriver shared it. It has the quiet, unmistakable quality of something people screenshot and send to the people they love without thinking twice.

This wasn't celebrity grief driving the spread. It was something more personal: a dying person saying the things everyone wishes they could say, or hear. It lived almost entirely on Instagram, which makes sense — this is a platform moment, not a challenge or a format. It just sits there and hits people.

🏔️ Oh Right, There's an Olympics

Italy is hosting the 2026 Winter Olympics. If that caught you off guard, you're not alone — this was the week the algorithm finally decided to surface them for a mass audience, and two content types drove most of it.

• Celebrities attempting winter sports under athlete supervision — the humiliation-plus-genuine-warmth formula that never fails
• Post-medal athlete interviews, especially Alysa Liu's gold medal reaction, which kept reappearing in top posts all week

The lesson here isn't about the Olympics specifically. It's that it's never the sport that goes viral. It's the human moment after the sport. That applies to every event, every season.

🏀 NBA All-Star Weekend

All-Star Weekend ran Feb 16–23 and was the most talked-about sporting event of the week by volume — skill challenges, celebrity matchups, brand deals, real-time reaction content.

What actually stood out: the best-performing accounts weren't the official NBA properties. They were mid-tier sports commentary creators with ground-level access who were posting in real time. Every clip that went wide came from someone faster than the league's own channels. Official media pays for being slower, every single time.

📺 Tyra Banks Had a Chance

Netflix released an America's Next Top Model retrospective documentary this week. Tyra Banks had the opportunity to take accountability for some genuinely harmful moments from the show's run — blackface, body shaming, exploitative treatment of contestants. She did not take it. She explained instead that certain things that were harmful were acceptable "at the time."

The internet did not agree that this was the right answer, and it spread accordingly. Former contestants, cultural commentary accounts, and general-audience reactions all converged into a content pile-on that ran for days. The thing that keeps these accountability moments going on social is that the clips do all the work — you don't need to watch the documentary to have a fully formed opinion. The doc is just the delivery mechanism. The discourse is the product.

📁 The Epstein Files Arrived. Mostly Redacted.

Everyone said the files were coming. They came. Most of the most important parts were black boxes.

The content that spread wasn't about revelations — it was about the absence of them. Only a fraction of the alleged documents were released, the most damaging names were obscured, and the victim list remained largely unaccounted for. Outrage-at-omission is a format that runs extremely hot, and no answers means the content cycle keeps feeding itself. Political commentary and true crime creators were all over it, and the audience is large, motivated, and nowhere near done.

👽 Obama Confirmed Aliens. Trump Got Mad.

On a podcast this week, former President Obama confirmed that aliens are real. Trump immediately accused him of leaking classified information and announced plans to release all government UFO files in response. This is a real thing that happened.

The angle that actually performed wasn't the alien question itself — it was the timing. Why is Obama saying this now? What is this a distraction from? The meta-narrative around why certain information gets surfaced when it does has become its own content genre, and this week handed it a perfect case study.

🥦 MAHA Is Having an Identity Crisis

Make America Healthy Again — the movement RFK Jr. built into the mainstream on promises of fighting toxic chemicals and corporate food systems — had a very difficult week. The Trump administration withdrew asbestos testing requirements for consumer products and issued an executive order promoting glyphosate, directly contradicting the movement's founding premise.

The MAHA base feels betrayed, and they're saying so loudly. When a movement's internal coherence collapses this publicly, the content cycle tends to sustain for weeks, not days. Watch this one.

🐺 Something Is Happening in Latin America

A subculture of people who identify as animals — therians, or transspecies — has apparently reached critical mass in Central America, and the Spanish-language internet spent the week in a state of collectively alarmed comedy about it.

The format was remarkably consistent: family skit where parents discover their child now identifies as a wolf or fox. Animal masks. Four-legged walking. Generational shock. It was working at a scale that's hard to overstate — some nano creators were pulling average likes that most large accounts would be happy with. Entirely TikTok-native, entirely grassroots. No equivalent in English-language content right now, which makes it interesting to track.

✨ A Rare Alignment and 548 Tarot Readings

If your feeds were overwhelmed with manifestation content and sign-specific readings this week, there's a concrete explanation: a new moon solar eclipse in Aquarius landed on February 17–20 and coincided with a Saturn-Neptune alignment that hasn't happened in 36 years. The astrology internet treated this as the content opportunity of the decade, and they weren't wrong.

The formula: genuine celestial event + urgency framing ("what you do in the next 72 hours matters") + everyone has a sign, so everyone has a reason to click. The top performing accounts were almost entirely small, highly trusted community creators — which is how the astrology space has always worked, and probably always will.

🤖 Another Week of AI Anxiety

Creators across the globe spent the week demonstrating AI tools automating knowledge work — presentations, video production, trading analysis — with a consistent undercurrent of anxiety underneath the enthusiasm. The tools getting the most attention: ChatGPT, Claude, Gamma for slide design, and a video AI being framed as making big-budget film production accessible to anyone.

The narrative driving the most engagement wasn't optimism or doom. It was the gap — the feeling that if you're not actively using these tools right now, you're already behind. FOMO is consistently outperforming both utopia and catastrophe as a content angle. That's worth knowing.

Everything Else

Brazil Carnival — Joyful, chaotic vlogs covering preparation through post-Carnival recovery. Almost entirely TikTok, almost entirely nano creators documenting their own night. The chaos is the content.

Pancake Day — The UK's Shrove Tuesday spiked hard. Best-performing post: a "mum of teenagers who won't care about pancakes" comedy that crushed every actual recipe tutorial. The relatable moment around a tradition always beats the instructional content about it.

Black History Month — The format doing the most work this week was the comedy critique: creators riffing on how performative and corporate the month's observance tends to be. Real information through a joke travels further than real information delivered earnestly. February keeps proving this.

Vinicius Jr. — Racially abused by a Benfica player during a Champions League match on Feb 18th. The player covered his mouth to hide it. Debate followed, going exactly where these conversations go — condemnation on one side, victim-blaming on the other. Mbappé's defense of his teammate was widely clipped. Not resolved.

Surfaced is published every week by Glystn — a social intelligence system that listens to millions of creator posts to find what's actually moving.