Internet, Viral | featured news

A contract to stay off Facebook until the end of the school year isn’t the first pact Paul Baier made with his 14-year-old daughter, but it's his first parenting decision to go viral.

Last June, a young woman in Texas uploaded a Justin Bieber fan video. She seemed a little .... unhinged. "I just made a list [of] all our future kids names: Bartholemew, Clarence, Steven, Bryce," she sings, eyes wide. The video was posted to Reddit in a thread called "Overly Attached Girlfriend." In 48 hours, it picked up over 1 million views. Within days, the media was running stories about it.

A tourist's snapshot of a New York City police officer giving new boots to a barefoot homeless man in Times Square has created an online sensation. Jennifer Foster, a tourist from Florence, Ariz., took a cellphone picture of Officer Larry DePrimo giving the man the all-weather boots and socks on a frigid night in Times Square on Nov. 14.

If you don’t know who Joseph Kony is at this point in time, which seems unlikely, I invite you to watch this video – which has been viewed by over 50 million people in the past two weeks – or read this Wikipedia article. Kony is #1 on the International Criminal Court’s list of people indicted by them for crimes against humanity. He and his movement, the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) have abducted tens of thousands of children over the past 25+ years, forcing them to become sex slaves or boy soldiers who have murdered and mutilated thousands of others.

If Joseph Kony lived in relative anonymity before this week, he's found Internet stardom now. A video about the atrocities carried out by Kony's Lord's Resistance Army is rocketing into viral video territory and is racking up millions of page views seemingly by the hour.

TODAY takes a look back at the viral videos that lit up the Internet. (Today Show)