Poppy's internet presence can be traced back to a YouTube video upload on November 4, 2014 which features her eating cotton candy. Today, this account is populated with hundreds of absurdist videos like the one above, the vast majority of which feature Poppy in a featureless space, posing existential questions over an ethereal soundtrack. The content of these short videos varies widely: there are two videos that are just 50 minutes of Poppy reading the Bible, a video of Poppy showing her viewers how to load a pistol (this video has since been removed), a video in which she shills for Tide detergent, and another where she talks about browsing /b/, an image board on 4chan.

But if you have the patience to work your way through all the videos on this channel, certain trends start to emerge. The most obvious is Poppy's fixation with the internet and social media culture, which she claims to love. But far more interesting is the general tone of the videos, which have gotten progressively darker over the last two years. Poppy's early videos feature a bright-eyed young girl clearly enamored with her glamorous pop lifestyle and her fans. Yet Poppy's character soon changes -- she begins posing increasingly dark questions ("Do you know what's happening? Have they told you? What rhymes with breath?"), talks about running away and wanting to disappear, references secrets that her "handlers" won't let her tell her viewers, and suggests that she is being controlled by a vague "they" from whom she cannot escape.