What is the deal with Skibidi Toilet? Why are your kids saying it, what it means and is it dangerous

• Skibidi Toilet started out life on YouTube as short clips. 
• Characters from the videos have found popularity on TikTok and Roblox. 
• Trend is particularly popular with Gen Alpha audiences. 

The internet has brought many wonders into our lives but it has also caused a lot of changes. Life before and after the dawn of social media is markedly different, particularly when it comes to how quickly new bits of slang can spread. 

Previously, I’ve pulled together a guide to some of the popular phrases your kids might have picked up from the internet and what they actually mean. But since the time of publication, a fresh new term has grown in popularity and your little ones may have even started saying it - skibidi toilet. 

Starting life on YouTube this meme is particularly popular among the so-called Generation Alpha. If you haven’t heard of this classification (unlike Gen Z and millennials), it is used for people born after the early 2010s through to now. 

If your kids have started yapping about skibidi toilet, or you’ve heard them make reference to it - you are probably wondering what it is all about. Here’s all you need to know: 

What is the deal with skibidi toilet? 

The wheel of time mercilessly continues to turn and before you know it your youth has slipped through your fingers. I have never felt further from my carefree days of childhood than when I started to look into skibidi toilet - I could almost feel the wrinkles forming on my body. 

But moving on from that brief detour into existentialism, let’s talk about the strange surrealism that is the skibidi toilet trend. The basic gist is that it started out life as a series of shorts on YouTube created by Alexey Gerasimov for his channel DaFuq!?Boom! 

The initial videos featured a decapitated human head in a grimy toilet singing a song featuring the phrase skibidi toilet (according to Forbes this track is inspired by the TikTok remix of the song "Dom Dom Yes Yes" by Biser King - but I feel like I need a rosetta stone to understand any of that). But there has since developed a lore - more on that later - involving other characters. 

I watched a skibidi toilet video so you don’t have to 

But just in case you do want to watch it, I have embedded an example from YouTube below so you can see for yourself. My personal reaction was genuine shock and bafflement - I don’t know what I was expecting but it still took me back, at least initially.

I knew it was going to be a head singing in a toilet, but the old school PS3-era CGI effects, the way it spins around and leaps at you was more than a little surreal. It almost felt like dream logic manifested into the real world, on my third or fourth watch I’m pretty sure I saw a tiny man with a suitcase walk across the screen at one point - but I’m not even sure what is real or not anymore. 

My cousin has two young kids - who I guess would be Gen Alpha - and they watch a lot of weird stuff like this on YouTube. Very quick and random, a subtle undertow of horror under the surface and characters that are just a little off. 

But then again when I was starting secondary school the most popular online clip among my friends was a song with animated badgers chanting ‘badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom’, so I probably shouldn’t throw any stones at glass houses. 

To be honest both skibidi toilet videos and the badger clips I watched as a youngster both successfully harness the weird and random energy of the internet that often propels content to viral success online. And there is something about toilet humour that does seem to chime with a child’s sense of humour, no matter the era they are growing up in. 

Where are kids finding skibidi toilet? 

You might be wondering where your kids are finding out about this deeply strange internet trend - this isn’t just a daft dance, it has got a unique flavour, a touch of horror and surrealism. It started out on YouTube as short clips, but the far more likely place that your kids discovered it (especially if they are in the Gen Alpha cohort) is on TikTok or even Roblox. 

A friend of mine, who has also recently turned 30, is more active on TikTok and has described skimming past skibidi toilet videos on the platform - labelling them as ‘brain rot’. But again we used to watch videos of animated badgers chanting ‘badger’, so I don’t think ‘brain rot’ is new on the internet. 

What is the ‘lore’ of skibidi toilet? 

As I mentioned earlier in the article there is a whole storyline associated with skibidi toilet videos. It may just look like a strange gimmick clip of a head in a loo singing a goofy song, but there is “lore” - and even an online wiki dedicated to documenting said lore. 

Made using Valve’s Source Filmmaker tool, which lets users create 3D videos, the videos document a fictional war between the human-headed toilets (like in the clip I embed higher up in the article) and humanoid characters with electric devices for heads. It is these characters that have cropped up in Roblox and caught the attention of younger audiences. 

I’m afraid I am not well versed enough in the actual storylines to go beyond outlining the basic facts of the “lore”. If you want to fall down a rabbit hole - here’s the skibidi toilet wiki. 

Is skibidi toilet dangerous to kids? 

As with any popular trend on TikTok, Roblox, YouTube, or any other corner of the internet your mind may have turned to whether this trend poses any danger to your kids. Recent years have brought panics around ‘blue whale’ and other allegedly deadly internet phenomena. 

The parenting website Motherhood has warned that skibidi toilet is “dangerous” and urges parents to set up controls on apps popular with kids to prevent them watching. But it doesn’t really seem to properly argue what exactly is “dangerous” about the videos - beyond that kids may try to replicate it. 

Wired reports that in Russia there have been concerns about the videos with calls for police to investigate them. In the article it was also revealed that in April of this year Anna Mityanina, St. Petersburg’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, played the videos to the city’s legislative assembly as part of an annual report on risks to children and she reportedly said: “A character in the form of a toilet, to put it mildly, is not cultured enough.”

But if we are being honest, there doesn’t seem to be anything inherently dangerous about the skibidi toilet clips, they are not calling for your kids to perform any harmful acts or put themselves in scary situations. Sure the success probably feels utterly incomprehensible to older audiences, then again your parents may have thought the same about Transformers or Dragon Ball Z. 

Have your kids made you watch skibidi toilet videos, what did you think? Did you find it as surreal as I did, let me know by emailing me: [email protected].