Paris Hilton invented the selfie with Britney Spears eleven years ago, or so she claims. The socialite took to Twitter on Sunday to announce her role in pioneering the selfie, CNET reported.
The post drew more than 230,000 likes and was widely shared across the social media platform, and the thousands of comments, many critical, proved to be entertaining and somewhat informative as users dug deep to discover the first actual selfie.
“Apparently Robert Cornelius took a selfie in the ‘30s. The 1830s,” one person replied to the tweet.
Another pointed out that the selfie “didn’t become popular till she did it!”
Paul McCartney recently told Jimmy Fallon that most people “don’t know that I invented the selfie,” The New York Post noted.
However, the daily newspaper credited the selfie to Cornelius, a pioneer in photography.
The concept stuck around and, by the turn of the century, thousands of amateur photographers were setting up selfies by pointing their cameras into mirrors.
It was only over the last few years that the act of taking a selfie blew up, popularized by socialites such as Paris Hilton.
According to Fortune, the word “selfie” was even dubbed as the 2013 word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary and, based on statistics released by a March 2014 Pew Research Center poll, over half of all millennials have snapped a selfie and posted it online.
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