A copypasta is a block of text copied and pasted to the Internet and social media. Copypasta containing controversial ideas or lengthy rants are often posted for humorous purposes, to provoke reactions from those unaware that the posted text is an internet meme.
Etymology
The term
copypasta is derived from the computer interface term "copy and paste",
the act of selecting a piece of text and copying it elsewhere. Usage of the word can be traced to an anonymous 4chan thread from 2006,
and
Merriam-Webster record it appearing on
Usenet and
Urban Dictionary for the first time that year.
Examples
Navy Seal
The Navy Seal copypasta, also sometimes known as Gorilla Warfare due to a misspelling of "guerrilla warfare" in its contents, is an aggressive but humorous paragraph supposedly written by an extremely well-trained member of the United States Navy SEALs to an unidentified "kiddo". Written in a manner similar to a non-serious
death threat, the author threatens the recipient while boasting of their own increasingly absurd or unfeasible accomplishments, such as having "over 300 confirmed kills" or being able to kill someone "in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands". This copypasta is often reposted as a humorous overreaction to an insult and is thought to have originated on the military-themed
imageboard OperatorChan, although the earliest known usage of the copypasta was on 4chan on November 11, 2010.
In 2019, the copypasta appeared in the alleged manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings. Some media outlets reported the copypasta as fact, for example publishing that Tarrant "a navy seal with over 300 confirmed kills".
Bee Movie
The
Bee Movie copypasta is the entire
screenplay of the 2007 animated film
Bee Movie, though this is sometimes shortened to just the introductory monologue. Use of the
Bee Movie's script as a copypasta began in 2013, when users posted it onto websites such as
Reddit and
Tumblr,
and it was popularized when edits of the film were first uploaded to YouTube in late 2016.
"A drive into deep left field by Castellanos"
"A drive into deep left field by Castellanos" is a quote from
Thom Brennaman, an American sports commentator for the Major League Baseball team the
Cincinnati Reds. The quote and copypasta originated during a broadcast of a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Kansas City Royals on 19 August 2020, when Brennaman uttered a homophobic slur on a
hot mic. When he was apologizing later in the broadcast, Reds player
Nick Castellanos hit a
home run, prompting Brennaman to deliver a
play-by-play in the middle of his apology, saying: "I pride myself and think of myself as a man of faith, as there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it will be a home run. And so that'll make it a 4–0 ballgame."
's Pablo Torre later remarked that it "was like listening to the band play on as the
Titanic was sinking. Except the band was also somehow the iceberg."
Legal implications
While most copypastas are meant to be humorous as memes, some have been used to propagate certain ideas or even change public opinion. In a noted 2024 case from the
Philippines, seasoned Filipino actor
Mon Confiado filed a
cyberlibel complaint against a
content creator who posted the
Flying Lotus copypasta, substituting Flying Lotus with the actor's name. The copypasta narrates an encounter with a well-known person behaving badly in a grocery store.
Technology
In computing, copypasta can refer to a piece of code that was copied and pasted.
Discussions of copypasta can be found in the code history of Linux, such as a 2013 comment describing code which "very much looks like copypasta"
(suggesting it was not originally authored) and correction of a "copypasta mistake"
where code was copied and not correctly amended.
See also
-
Creepypasta, brief, user-generated, paranormal stories intended to scare readers
-
Chain letter
-
Faxlore, similar content circulated by fax machine
-
Know Your Meme, a website and video series that researches and documents the history of copypastas and similar content
-
Running gag, a recurring joke
-
Snowclone, a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants
-
Shitposting, the practice of posting intentionally low-quality or provocative content to troll or solicit reactions from others
External links
