Virat Kohli is trending on social media again — and not for anything that happened on a cricket field. The Indian batting legend accidentally liked a post by popular social media influencer LizLaz on Instagram, sending the internet into its predictable spiral of memes, screenshots and rapid-fire commentary before the like was quietly removed.
The incident has drawn particular attention because it is not the first time something like this has happened. An eerily similar episode involving Avneet Kaur’s Instagram post had previously gone viral, with Kohli’s accidental like sparking a near-identical wave of social media chaos before being walked back. The pattern has now become something of a running joke among Indian cricket fans — and Yuzvendra Chahal, never one to miss an open goal, made sure everyone knew it.
Chahal’s One-Word Comment That Said Everything
The leg-spinner dropped a single word in the comments section of LizLaz’s post — “Algorithm” — accompanied by a skull emoji, racking up 390 likes within hours. It is the kind of comment that requires zero elaboration and lands perfectly precisely because it does not try to explain itself. The implication is obvious: Kohli’s Instagram algorithm, not Kohli himself, is responsible for the wayward like. Chahal’s timing, arriving just two hours after the like went viral, suggests he was watching the situation unfold in real time and waited for exactly the right moment to deliver it.
The comment section around Chahal’s post tells its own story. One user wrote “Here before Virat Kohli posts a story regarding the algorithm” — a direct reference to the Avneet Kaur incident, after which Kohli had addressed the accidental like publicly, attributing it to his phone being handled by someone else. Another simply wrote “Virat Kohli respect button” with a checkmark. A third tagged Kohli directly asking him to unlike the post. LizLaz’s post, which had accumulated 25,200 likes and 737 comments at the time of writing, was seeing traffic driven almost entirely by the Kohli like rather than its organic reach.
The Avneet Kaur Episode and Why This Keeps Happening
The parallel with the Avneet Kaur incident is what gives this story its second layer. When Kohli’s like on Kaur’s post went viral earlier, it triggered a news cycle that lasted several days, included a public clarification from Kohli, and generated the kind of engagement that most celebrity social media moments can only dream of. The fact that a near-identical situation has now repeated itself — same platform, same accidental mechanism, same immediate viral spread — has only amplified the comedic value, which is precisely what Chahal’s “Algorithm” comment was designed to capture.
For Chahal, who has built a reputation as one of Indian cricket’s most socially media-savvy personalities, the comment is on-brand and perfectly calibrated. For Kohli, who has 270 million-plus Instagram followers and whose every platform action is monitored in real time by a significant portion of them, the incident is a reminder that at that scale of following, there is no such thing as an accidental like that stays accidental for long.
The like has since been removed. The internet, however, has already done what the internet does — and Chahal’s skull emoji is doing the rounds across every cricket WhatsApp group in the country.