A rapper signed to RCA Records has one TikTok that has outrun everything else he’s ever posted, and it isn’t a song. The Gashi deer video is 27 seconds of a deer looking into a phone camera, and it has 13.3 million likes.
@gashi
The video has 96.5 million views and 3 million shares.
There’s no song snippet and nothing to learn. A deer stands in the snow and looks into the lens, close enough to fill the frame. Oversized ears, a black button nose, a white patch under the chin. Behind it: low buildings, a streetlight, a bare tree, an animal pen off to the left, and flat winter light on the ground.
The caption is a single hashtag. #viralvideo.
The numbers are absurd for a musician’s account
Posted December 18, 2024, the clip has 96.5 million views, 13.3 million likes, 3 million shares, 817,616 saves, and 99,100 comments.
The like rate is the striking part. Nearly 14% of the people who watched it tapped the heart, which almost never happens at that scale. So is the share figure: 3 million people sent a deer to someone else.
For a sense of the ceiling, Guinness World Records has the most-liked TikTok of all time as Bella Poarch’s “M to the B” lip-sync, at 54.9 million likes as of January 2022. A deer clip with one hashtag for a caption is sitting at roughly a quarter of that.
It’s more than half his account’s entire history
@gashi is verified, has 2.3 million followers, and has posted 261 videos that have earned 24.3 million likes in total.
13.3 million of those 24.3 million came from this one video. One 27-second deer clip accounts for about 55% of every like the account has ever collected. The other 260 videos, the music promotion included, split the rest.
Gashi has not said where it was filmed or whose deer it is. The caption is one hashtag, and he never followed it with an explanation.
Who Gashi is, for anyone arriving via the deer
Labinot Gashi was born in Tripoli, Libya, on October 4, 1989, to ethnic Albanian parents from Kosovo. He spent his childhood moving through several African and European countries before settling in Brooklyn at 10, where the language barrier pushed him toward music.
He signed to RCA and broke through in 2018 with “Creep on Me,” featuring French Montana and DJ Snake, which remains his highest charting single. He’s worked with G-Eazy, Nipsey Hussle, and DJ Snake, released his self-titled major-label debut in 2019, and has eight studio albums out. The stage name has cycled through The Kid Gashi and G4SHI before landing back on GASHI. His TikTok bio reads “The Killah Whales of Gotham.”
None of that is why 96 million people watched his account.
Animals keep beating everything else
This is the oldest pattern on the platform, and it holds no matter who’s posting. A close-up of an animal making eye contact needs no context, no language, and no cultural knowledge. It travels through every algorithm and across every border, and it gets saved and forwarded rather than argued about, which is exactly what ranking systems reward.
Artists who spend real money trying to engineer a moment on TikTok tend to learn some version of this. The platform’s biggest hits are rarely the ones anyone planned, which is why a label can lose control of its own audio in an afternoon and why fandoms react to things nobody briefed.
Nearly two years on, the deer still holds more likes than Gashi’s other 260 videos put together. For more on the internet’s odd hierarchies, follow our Pop Culture section.
