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It Happened Online

The week’s second-biggest online bird drama.

Taylor Blake and her emu Emmanuel went viral on TikTok this summer before bird flu swept her farm.Credit...Todd Owyoung/NBC, via Getty Images

It appears TikTok’s favorite emu, Emmanuel Todd Lopez, is going to be OK after his farm’s recent brush with avian influenza that killed many of his fellow feathered mates. His owner’s reputation, however, might not be doing so well after Twitter users posted screenshots of old tweets they said were from her account.

Let’s walk through this week’s second-biggest online bird drama. (The first, of course, being the drama of Elon Musk buying a certain bird app for $44 billion.)

Emmanuel Todd Lopez is an emu. He is 5-foot-8 and lives on Knuckle Bump Farms, a small hobby farm in Florida. The farm’s TikTok account, run by Taylor Blake, has more than two million followers where people can watch videos featuring cows, emus and goats. (Oh my!)

Emmanuel has played a big part in the farm’s online following. Over the summer, Ms. Blake and Emmanuel went viral for Emmanuel’s habit of wandering into her videos and knocking Ms. Blake’s phone to the ground.

In one popular TikTok video, Ms. Blake is trying to record when Emmanuel appears in the frame, apparently intent on pecking Ms. Blake’s phone. “Emmanuel, don’t do it,” Ms. Blake said in the video, speaking like a parent addressing a misbehaving child.

It worked. Emmanuel didn’t peck the phone and, as a side benefit, he became an internet celebrity. The Washington Post interviewed him in July. (Ms. Blake answered questions via Zoom while Emmanuel looked on.) Ms. Blake appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” In a clip on YouTube titled, “Jimmy Don’t Do It,” Ms. Blake yells at Mr. Fallon as if he were her emu.

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