If you’ve been active on Instagram for the past couple of weeks, you have likely seen videos of people dumping ice water over their heads for the USC Speak Your Mind ice bucket challenge. From your friends to people you barely know but follow anyway, everyone seems to be posting videos that depict the video creator pouring ice water on themselves and nominating three or four others to do the same. The ice bucket challenge has been dominating Instagram for weeks,but after scrolling through all of these stories and posts, do viewers really understand why people are doing this challenge, or why it started in the first place?
The ice bucket challenge first gained popularity over a decade ago to raise funds and awareness for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a motor function-affecting illness. The challenge went viral on social media platforms, especially Facebook, during the summer 2014 and raised $115 million, according to the ALS website. In February 2025 , a club called the Mental Illness Discussion Club at the University of South Carolina revived the challenge to spread awareness for mental health and remove stigmas surrounding mental health and suicidal ideation, dubbing it the “USC Speak Your Mind Ice Bucket Challenge. The trend has since gone viral amongst teenagers and young adults on Instagram and TikTok.
This new iteration of the ice bucket challenge did go viral and has been an effective strategy for the USC club to market their cause. The origins of the challenge were well intentioned, and its popularity shows the potential of viral social media trends to spread awareness for important causes. However, in many ice bucket challenge videos people forget to even name the challenge and just go straight to nominating other people and dumping water. Some people even forget to tag the original club or the university in their posts, making their nominees and viewers are unable to view the original challenge or its fundraiser links. Overall, as the challenge has spread nationally, the mental health-related intentions have faded into the rear-view mirror, with the spectacle of people shrieking from the shock of ice cold water taking over as the main reason for the trend becoming extremely viral.
The new ice bucket challenge instead seems to have devolved into a form of performative activism, a type of activism that is ultimately done for attention despite appearing to genuinely support a cause on the surface. People seem to be doing the challenge mainly to dare their friends and not to actually focus on mental health. The original creators of the trend at USC were most likely genuine in their desire to raise mental health awareness, and many nominees or creators are not deliberately leaving out fundraising links or forgetting to name the challenge. Quick social media posts simply may not be an effective format for raising awareness.
On Instagram, stories–the main form of media that the ice bucket challenge is circulated on–are restricted to a 24-hour view period, which leaves very little time for people to view. Instagram Stories also requires the creator to manually input links and tags, which may lead to people forgetting to link the original creator of the challenge on their story . Instagram and other social media platforms are almost like a constant telephone game, with trends and “pass-it-on” challenges like the ice bucket challenge allowing things to slip through the cracks and get lost in translation The original ALS challenge at least was consistently clearly linked to a fundraiser, partly because the challenge was done on a slower-paced social media platform, Facebook, where posts stay up longer and therefore get longer amounts of view time than short Instagram stories. People clearly understood what the challenge stood for and how it raised awareness for ALS. This new ice bucket challenge, starting out as a well intentioned trend, has slowly become less about directly raising awareness and more about tagging as many people as you know.
In contrast to the ALS ice bucket challenge, the Speak Your Mind challenge comes across as a less meaningful use of the action of pouring ice water to raise awareness. Pouring ice water over your head was meant to signify the paralysis that ALS could bring, according to ALS United. The challenge was also ultimately hoping to raise enough money to discover a cure for ALS, a cure that has not been found even as the ice bucket challenge re-surges for a different cause. Pouring an ice bucket over your head is not as deliberately symbolic of mental health awareness, leading to some in the ALS community accusing the USC club of taking a viral challenge to instead promote their cause and gain temporary internet fame, according to Yahoo News.
Instead of reviving a challenge clearly meant to still promote a lingering issue and one that doesn’t effectively address its new issue in the format its in, the Speak Your Mind Challenge could instead adapt to more meaningful formats to spread more effective mental health awareness. The Mental Illness Discussion Club could’ve instead tried to start a new viral challenge on one origin post that everyone could do individually, instead of each participant nominating people. This would lead to people being more likely to copy any links or images that an “original” post would have onto their stories and not have anything lost in translation. The challenge could’ve also done something original and creatively tied to mental health struggles, like having participants ride a roller coaster to symbolize “emotional roller coasters” or running across the screen to symbolize the never-ending journey or marathon that is a life dealing with mental health.
Spreading awareness on social media is amazing, as it gives wide access for people to speak out and raise funds or discourse over challenging issues. However, some activist challenges can devolve into purely performative stunts for clout and viewers as people forget to mention the origins of the challenge. Instead of simply just doing the challenge without mentioning its name or purpose, people should use social media to spread and proliferate real, heartfelt stories and fundraising links in order to try and fix the issues at hand. The cold truth is that for real change to happen, we have to actually do things that directly contribute to the issues we want to solve.
