Chat Is This Real?

About

Chat Is This Real? is a catchphrase referencing a question frequently asked by streamers to their viewers, aka "chat," if a story or piece of content that they're reacting to is real. The phrase was popularized by streamer iShowSpeed around March 2023 after clips of him asking the question, often ironically to obviously fake content, began to go viral, inspiring people to use it in similar ironic ways over faked content and as a way to ask people, "Can you believe this?"

Origin

YouTube streamer iShowSpeed commonly asks his chat, "Chat, is this real?" when reacting to content. He often asks the question ironically to content that has an obvious element of fakeness to it. For example, on March 20th, 2023, iShowSpeed uploaded the VOD of one of his streams to YouTube^[1] in which, at the 50:40 mark, he watches a video of an AI-generated Elon Musk voice offering him a Tesla if he reacts to the video, asking the chat, "Is this real?" (shown below). The video gained over 1.4 million views in three months.

Spread

The clip of Speed saying the line was reuploaded by TikToker^[2] @triplew3 on March 20th, 2023, garnering over 900,000 views in three months. It was also uploaded by TikToker^[3] @ishowspeedfinest on March 23rd, garnering over 5.5 million views in roughly the same span of time. On April 26th, Twitter^[4] user @ShootaCat posted an image of a sleeping kitten captioned "died," writing, "Chat is this real?" and garnering over 3,200 likes in two months (shown below).

The catchphrase became particularly prevalent on TikTok^[5][6] throughout May 2023, used as a spam comment and in the descriptions of videos. On June 1st, Instagram^[7][8] users tyroneisaurousrex and nocontext.twt used the phrase in the descriptions of posts showing fake Twitter posts, garnering over 16,000 and 5,600 likes, respectively, in six days (shown below, left and right). On June 3rd, the term was then defined on Urban Dictionary. ^[9]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References