Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.
You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.
If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.
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?
Where it started
Sarah Maria Griffin / Griffski/TikTok
Sarah Maria Griffin / Griffski/TikTok / Griffski/TikTok
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.
‘Enshittification’
Nicky Ryan / The Journal
Nicky Ryan / The Journal / The Journal
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.
Aoife Barry / The Journal
Aoife Barry / The Journal / The Journal
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.
Escapism
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.
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.
Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone...
A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article.
Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Close
37 Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic.
Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy
here
before taking part.
Saw a class of young kids and their teacher and SNAs putting tomatoes on it today . Made me smile . I love the innocence and surrealism of this harmless joke . Ps well done to those SNAs and to the teacher
@Dave G Doe: because kids need to get out and have fun sometimes too. They dont have to be locked up in school all the time chained to studying. Its necessary for them to experience the world outside four walls, as the whole point of education is to prepare them to go out into the real world.
@Rafa C: Falling off my seat in shock that the usually cheerful, whimsical Journal comments contingent are miffed by people having a laugh and enjoying something silly.
Positive virality during covid? Absolute tripe. Remember this site lauding Tony Holohan and showing the mural of him dressed as superman. Do you feel embarrassment now?
For those who take life too seriously, this was a small brief period of fun. Either embrace it or ignore it but don’t ruin other people’s attempts at a light hearted look at life.
Zuck decided that censoring certain political views was likely to bite Meta in the posterior so he changed tack – nothing to do with keeping anyone “safe”.
Why didn’t the local seagulls sweep down and tore them apart like they doing to the rubbish bags in the area they musta been rotten tomato’s people seem to b sticking into their mouth s
@liam ward: Because Seagulls don’t do fruit or veg and anyone who leaves rubbish bags lying around and not in a bin in this day and age deserve everything they get. Humans are supposed to be intelligent whereas gulls are opportunistic hunters.
@sean weir: Every article above this one has comments closed,some for obvious reasons,but some for the complete and utter childishness that’s gone on all day on other articles,my god are there people so sad and pathetic to spend there time on here like children,and they know who they are,
@Deano74: Pathetic I think is more appropriate. They literally spend every waking moment of their lives on here commenting. They probably don’t have anyone or anything in their life tbh,hence the need for validation, on a news site of all places lol
'A proud day for Ireland': McIlroy's dramatic Masters win hailed as 'a finish for the ages'
Updated
1 hr ago
13.7k
44
Killybegs
People in shock after man found dead in Co Donegal house as gardaí launch probe
2 hrs ago
9.5k
Rory McIlroy wins the Masters in mind-boggling drama
Gavin Cooney
11 hrs ago
110k
168
Your Cookies. Your Choice.
Cookies help provide our news service while also enabling the advertising needed to fund this work.
We categorise cookies as Necessary, Performance (used to analyse the site performance) and Targeting (used to target advertising which helps us keep this service free).
We and our 168 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device. Selecting Accept All enables tracking technologies to support the purposes shown under we and our partners process data to provide. If trackers are disabled, some content and ads you see may not be as relevant to you. You can resurface this menu to change your choices or withdraw consent at any time by clicking the Cookie Preferences link on the bottom of the webpage .Your choices will have effect within our Website. For more details, refer to our Privacy Policy.
We and our vendors process data for the following purposes:
Use precise geolocation data. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Store and/or access information on a device. Personalised advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research and services development.
Cookies Preference Centre
We process your data to deliver content or advertisements and measure the delivery of such content or advertisements to extract insights about our website. We share this information with our partners on the basis of consent. You may exercise your right to consent, based on a specific purpose below or at a partner level in the link under each purpose. Some vendors may process your data based on their legitimate interests, which does not require your consent. You cannot object to tracking technologies placed to ensure security, prevent fraud, fix errors, or deliver and present advertising and content, and precise geolocation data and active scanning of device characteristics for identification may be used to support this purpose. This exception does not apply to targeted advertising. These choices will be signaled to our vendors participating in the Transparency and Consent Framework.
Manage Consent Preferences
Necessary Cookies
Always Active
These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work.
Targeting Cookies
These cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.
Functional Cookies
These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and personalisation. They may be set by us or by third party providers whose services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies then these services may not function properly.
Performance Cookies
These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not be able to monitor our performance.
Store and/or access information on a device 113 partners can use this purpose
Cookies, device or similar online identifiers (e.g. login-based identifiers, randomly assigned identifiers, network based identifiers) together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it each time it connects to an app or to a website, for one or several of the purposes presented here.
Personalised advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research and services development 149 partners can use this purpose
Use limited data to select advertising 117 partners can use this purpose
Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times an ad is presented to you).
Create profiles for personalised advertising 84 partners can use this purpose
Information about your activity on this service (such as forms you submit, content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (for example, information from your previous activity on this service and other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (that might include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present advertising that appears more relevant based on your possible interests by this and other entities.
Use profiles to select personalised advertising 84 partners can use this purpose
Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on your advertising profiles, which can reflect your activity on this service or other websites or apps (like the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects.
Create profiles to personalise content 39 partners can use this purpose
Information about your activity on this service (for instance, forms you submit, non-advertising content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (such as your previous activity on this service or other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (which might for example include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present content that appears more relevant based on your possible interests, such as by adapting the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find content that matches your interests.
Use profiles to select personalised content 35 partners can use this purpose
Content presented to you on this service can be based on your content personalisation profiles, which can reflect your activity on this or other services (for instance, the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects. This can for example be used to adapt the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find (non-advertising) content that matches your interests.
Measure advertising performance 138 partners can use this purpose
Information regarding which advertising is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine how well an advert has worked for you or other users and whether the goals of the advertising were reached. For instance, whether you saw an ad, whether you clicked on it, whether it led you to buy a product or visit a website, etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of advertising campaigns.
Measure content performance 63 partners can use this purpose
Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine whether the (non-advertising) content e.g. reached its intended audience and matched your interests. For instance, whether you read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast or look at a product description, how long you spent on this service and the web pages you visit etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of (non-advertising) content that is shown to you.
Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources 78 partners can use this purpose
Reports can be generated based on the combination of data sets (like user profiles, statistics, market research, analytics data) regarding your interactions and those of other users with advertising or (non-advertising) content to identify common characteristics (for instance, to determine which target audiences are more receptive to an ad campaign or to certain contents).
Develop and improve services 86 partners can use this purpose
Information about your activity on this service, such as your interaction with ads or content, can be very helpful to improve products and services and to build new products and services based on user interactions, the type of audience, etc. This specific purpose does not include the development or improvement of user profiles and identifiers.
Use limited data to select content 37 partners can use this purpose
Content presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type, or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times a video or an article is presented to you).
Use precise geolocation data 49 partners can use this special feature
With your acceptance, your precise location (within a radius of less than 500 metres) may be used in support of the purposes explained in this notice.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification 27 partners can use this special feature
With your acceptance, certain characteristics specific to your device might be requested and used to distinguish it from other devices (such as the installed fonts or plugins, the resolution of your screen) in support of the purposes explained in this notice.
Ensure security, prevent and detect fraud, and fix errors 95 partners can use this special purpose
Always Active
Your data can be used to monitor for and prevent unusual and possibly fraudulent activity (for example, regarding advertising, ad clicks by bots), and ensure systems and processes work properly and securely. It can also be used to correct any problems you, the publisher or the advertiser may encounter in the delivery of content and ads and in your interaction with them.
Deliver and present advertising and content 102 partners can use this special purpose
Always Active
Certain information (like an IP address or device capabilities) is used to ensure the technical compatibility of the content or advertising, and to facilitate the transmission of the content or ad to your device.
Match and combine data from other data sources 73 partners can use this feature
Always Active
Information about your activity on this service may be matched and combined with other information relating to you and originating from various sources (for instance your activity on a separate online service, your use of a loyalty card in-store, or your answers to a survey), in support of the purposes explained in this notice.
Link different devices 54 partners can use this feature
Always Active
In support of the purposes explained in this notice, your device might be considered as likely linked to other devices that belong to you or your household (for instance because you are logged in to the same service on both your phone and your computer, or because you may use the same Internet connection on both devices).
Identify devices based on information transmitted automatically 92 partners can use this feature
Always Active
Your device might be distinguished from other devices based on information it automatically sends when accessing the Internet (for instance, the IP address of your Internet connection or the type of browser you are using) in support of the purposes exposed in this notice.
Save and communicate privacy choices 72 partners can use this special purpose
Always Active
The choices you make regarding the purposes and entities listed in this notice are saved and made available to those entities in the form of digital signals (such as a string of characters). This is necessary in order to enable both this service and those entities to respect such choices.
have your say