In the months leading up to the 86th Academy Awards in 2014, the Twitter team came up with the idea of having presenter Ellen DeGeneres tweet a selfie from the stage, with the audience in the background. During rehearsals for the show, Ellen saw Meryl Streep's seating card and decided to rehearse taking a selfie with her. Samsung was sponsoring the event, and their representatives were present during the rehearsals. They saw Ellen practicing with her iPhone and asked if she would be willing to use a Samsung phone instead. Ellen agreed.

When Ellen took the first selfie of the night, it got thousands of retweets almost instantly. She then decided to go down and take a selfie with Streep, which turned into a group selfie with Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong’o, Julia Roberts, Jared Leto, Kevin Spacey, and Bradley Cooper, who was holding the camera. The selfie was retweeted 750,000 times in just 45 minutes, causing Twitter to crash for a few minutes and making this one of the most memorable Oscars in modern history.