Pop Culture Trend Drop: The Tween Internet Culture Field Guide
Published 09 May 2025
Stylus' monthly Pop Culture Trend Drop videos turn a 90-second spotlight on an emerging trend or developing discourse from the world of entertainment and online culture. With the Stylus eye for future-facing innovations, we break down what's happening, who it's reaching, and why it's key for your brand engagement messaging.
Emerging from pandemic-disrupted childhoods, tweens (aged 10-13) are using their native understanding of internet culture as they flirt with independence and identity-building.
Video Transcript
Have you met the new tweens?
Emerging from pandemic-disrupted childhoods, today’s 10-13-year-olds are not the tweens of earlier generations. As they try their hand at independence and identity-building, they’re pushing past the childhood-facing content of their Gen Alpha peers, but they’re uninterested in the angsty self-awareness of online Gen Z.
Take their delight in brain rot content.The original fans of the utterly nonsensical Skibidi Toilet, tweens love to invest in their beloved anti-earnest memes, which favour playful edge over Gen Z’s world-weary existentialism.
Avidly following their evolution all the way to sing-song odes to Fanum Tax and Skibidi Ohio Rizz, an offbeat sensibility successfully picked up by brands including KFC and Nutter Butter, banking millions of views.
They’re also harnessing brain rot’s cryptic lingo to sound cool offline. Terms for attractiveness and cringe, like ‘womp womp’, ‘selling’, and ‘mogging’, asserting their autonomy and confounding their parents.
For tweens, their influencer role models show them how to turn content creation passions into professions like the YouTuber creative crews and the Gen Z YouTube gamer girls, inspiring tween girls to keep gaming, at the age when they’re more likely to give it up.
But today’s tweens are also especially vulnerable to social media’s darker influences. Like the toxic perfectionism passed on by #beautyTok and the misogynistic voices filtering down to girls but particularly boys.
This is where brands can do some of the heavy lifting. Standing in them in good stead with tweens as they age by building campaigns around positive masculinity, attuned to inspire and affirm rather than preach or scold. Or by releasing pressures on physical appearance and reinvigorating play instead, like beauty brands Dove and Bubble.
Tweens are seeking a balance of encouragement and care and uplift for their burgeoning sense of self-worth so they can get on with enjoying their unhinged memes.