For the uninitiated, Joey Swoll is massively popular fitness influencer who built a large following via his ruthless takedowns of people misbehaving in the gym, and his self-righteous rants on gym etiquette.
He’s also just become the latest online personality to prove why you should never apologise to the social media outrage mob: because it will simply make the initial backlash against you 1,000 times worse, and also anger a whole new set of people who are upset that you apologised.
It all started when he posted a tribute to the late, great Hulk Hogan, which wound up a large section of the internet that believes we cannot say good things about dead people who had made racist comments at some point during their lifetimes.
The people who were outraged at Joey Swoll probably don’t even work out and so weren’t even his supporters to begin with, but instead of ignoring them and letting the drama pass (which it would have in minus 1 week given the attention span of the internet), he decided to issue a lame apology video in his car:
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Soon after, the internet wasn’t just accusing Joey Swoll of being a terrible racist, but also of being insufferably woke. Do you know how hard it is to be accused of both those things at the same time? Well, actually, maybe it’s not so hard in this day and age. In any case, he’s apparently had enough of the backlash and announced his retirement from social media altogether:
The crazy thing is that he didn’t even dress up as Hulk Hogan in that video after Hogan had died. That video already existed, and he decided to re-post it alongside an incredibly brief RIP message after hearing Hogan had passed away. Somehow, it still resulted in all this backlash and drama, which Joey Swoll handled terribly by giving it attention in the first place, let alone apologising for it.
Crazier still, he initially put out a video defending his decision to pay tribute to Hulk Hogan, but when that only caused the backlash to grow, he lost his balls and filmed the apology (which may or may not have been influenced by him using the world “coloured” in this clip):
Joey Swoll made a tribute video to Hulk Hogan, a fictional character played by the late entertainer, Terry Bollea, and people lost their shit.
He then made an explanation video and said ‘colored’ instead of ‘people of color.’
Now it’s ’cancel’ time. 🙄pic.twitter.com/VHdXStIdbK
— Amiri King (@AmiriKing) July 29, 2025
He may be a bit of an annoying tw@t at times, but I actually feel bad for Joey Swoll. All he did was post a tribute message to Hulk Hogan, and it all went so poorly that a few days later he’s literally quit the internet for good. Or so he says, anyway. Time will tell on that one.
The main takeaway is that things always get blown out of proportion on the internet and the last thing you should ever do in a situation like this is apologise. As soon as you do, it’s game over. Word to the wise.
For the time Joey Swoll called out Chelsea’s Mykhailo Mudryk (remember him?) for shaming an elderly gym-goer, click HERE.
