CONSPIRACY THEORY: #ThrowbackThursday is a government scheme, so you better delete those baby pictures ASAP

Honestly, if you're still doing #TBT posts in 2018, you're either an aging celebrity, corny as hell, or you run the Wendy's Twitter account. Sorry, but I do make the rules, and my rules say that shit is lame.

And according to some of the more creative corners of the internet, Throwback Thursday isn't just a dated internet trend, it's actually a secret government plot. Some surveillance agency (the NSA is the most popular culprit, duh) started the hashtag to improve their facial recognition and age progression algorithms.

In general, I'm pretty skeptical of conspiracy theories because I'm a sheep who never asks questions about the nature of my reality. But this one actually makes a ton of sense. We already know that the NSA scrapes social media for recent photos of people's faces — that information was literally part of the Edward Snowden leaks.

But without weekly encouragement, how could the government gain access to photos taken before we documented every second of our lives online? And honestly, it fucking works: there are more than 40 million posts tagged #ThrowbackThursday on Instagram, and more than 400 million tagged #tbt — and those are just the ones spelled right!

I'm not saying it's 100 percent undeniably true that Throwback Thursday is a government scam, but I am saying that I won't be posting a #TBT any time soon — and not just because I was ugly until like, two years ago. Definitely not because of that.

@k80way