The Ice Bucket Challenge Is Back, and This Time, It's Trending on TikTok

Back in the mid-2010s, old people who used to be young participated in something called the ice bucket challenge. At the time, the challenge was designed to raise awareness about ALS, and involved dumping a bucket of icy water on your head and then nominating three other people to do the same.

The challenge went wildly viral at the time, and now, it seems like it might be back. People on TikTok are getting nominated for something, and many of them don't know what it's all for. Here's what we know about what nomination means.

Being "nominated" on TikTok means that someone has done the latest iteration of the ice bucket challenge and is nominating you to do it next. This is exactly how the first iteration of the challenge worked, and at the time, a number of famous people got involved and ultimately nominated other famous people to participate in the trend. Now, people are being nominated all over TikTok.

Being nominated doesn't mean that you're obligated to participate in the trend yourself, but it does put some social pressure on you to do the trend yourself. That's the kind of social contagion that allowed the original trend to go viral, and because it's for a good cause, it can make you feel a little bit guilty if you don't do the trend yourself.

While the original challenge was all about raising awareness for ALS, this new version started when the University of South Carolina's Mental Illness Needs Discussion (MIND) Club posted a video in which their founder Wade Jefferson announced that they were starting a "SparkYourMIND Ice Bucket Challenge." Jefferson started the challenge after losing two close friends to suicide, and the goal is to spread awareness for mental health.

The challenge also has a fundraising goal, and while it was initially set to $500, the trend has raised more than $190,000 for Active Minds, and its target is now $250,000. As the trend has been embraced again, roughly 10 years after it first spread across the internet, some TikTok users have pointed out all the ways this undercuts the original mission of the challenge, which was to raise awareness for a different disease.

"Seeing this USC Ice Bucket Challenge become so popular when it was literally for ALS to raise awareness because nobody knows what ALS is," one TikTok user wrote.

Whether these trends actually undercut one another or not is one thing, but the challenge's return has also introduced an entire new generation to it who were too young to participate a decade ago.

Will we get a third ice bucket challenge in 2035? Only time will tell, but it's certainly interesting to consider the fact that the challenge seems to have reemerged a full decade after it became one of the defining social media moments of the 2010s.