Last week, the Twitter Comms team put out a statement regarding an increase in a particular kind of spammy behavior: the copypasta, a term created in 2006 as a mangling of the phrase “copy + paste.”
While they didn’t specify what kind of spam inspired the statement, it might involve the high volume of tweets about controversial subjects, many of which are completely identical: “I’m done with the NBA. It’s turned into an extension of the far left” and “I’ve been a Democrat my whole life…I didn’t realize I became a Marxist. It happened without me even knowing it.”
NBC connected these tweets to a couple of accounts posting similar sentiments that were terminated last Wednesday for posting spam and displaying “artificially manipulative behavior.” That might be enough to turn you into the boy who cried “Russian bots,” but… Listen, it would be easy to assign a specific, sinister foreign origin to these tweets, but I’m wary of easy explanations when it comes to how shit happens on the internet. It’s always more complicated than it first seems.
Rather than focusing on what triggered the Twitter Comms tweet, I’m interested in the tweet itself. Specifically, the use of “copypasta,” a word with a history as convoluted as the concept of spam.
Multiplicity
Although “copypasta,” like basically everything on the internet, can be traced back to Usenet newsgroups and 4chan forums, it didn’t get widely used until around 2010. That was the year that what became known as the “Navy Seal copypasta” was written, which became popular enough to get a Wikipedia shout-out and a Dictionary.com entry. It’s a parody of the kind of internet tough-guy who makes absurd claims about his tough-guy credentials and attacks other people online, starting with, “What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals.”
That was the main mode of the copypasta until the mid-2010s, when some idiot internet innovator posted the entire script to the 2007 animated Jerry Seinfeld film Bee Movie to Facebook as a life event. People had been using Bee Movie and its script, which begins with the classic line, “According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly,” as meme fodder for years, but after the Facebook post was shared almost 4,000 times, the story got picked up by New York Magazine.
More recently, a copypasta often referred to as “eat hot chip and lie” surfaced in the last couple of years, a parody of people who post bizarre nonsense opinions online about the way women act.
Since then, TikTok teens, who we all know are now the ultimate arbiters of culture, have embraced “eat hot chip and lie” — possibly as a way to turn an ironic, over-the-top statement into a celebration of female dirtbaggery (“Listen here, bitch, I am like other girls. I love McDonald. I love charge my phone. I love twerk. I love be bisexual. And last but not least, I love eat hot chip and lie.”). It’s like the 1990s Bart Simpsons shirts that made school administrators mad because they said “underachiever and proud of it.”
Or possibly I’ve been inside and under-stimulated for six months. Please let me go back outside. I don’t want to be a Gen Z TikTok correspondent anymore.
Manufacturing urban legends
Although “copypasta” never really caught on as mainstream slang, for the last decade it has been living in the shadow of the derivative term “creepypasta.” Which basically means copypasta, but creepy. It’s not that original.
But despite the word being a take on “copypasta,” the two terms refer to very different types of writing. Where copypastas usually look like they could be YouTube comments or forum replies, creepypastas are self-contained stories that are supposed to have a narrative arc. YouTuber Jenny Nicholson calls them “what you graduate to when you’re slightly too old for Goosebumps. And you keep reading them into adulthood if you’re intimidated by real books,” and the New York Times described creepypastas in 2010 as being “like ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ 2.0,” a form of media that exploits its own limitations to create authentic spooks and frights.
Where the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project used a lo-fi found-footage aesthetic to convince viewers they were seeing the last hours of some real film students, creepypastas try to convince you, the reader, that the anonymous person who wrote this story actually played a haunted video game. Or explored an abandoned Disney park. Or interned for Nickelodeon and saw a rough cut of a Spongebob episode that included pictures of dead children.
The most famous creepypasta projects expanded beyond the medium. Slender Man, for example, inspired ARGs (alternate reality games), video games, and, infamously, a real-life attempted murder. Candle Cove, a story about a mysterious public-access TV show, was written by an established author and clearly labeled fiction, but it’s still usually referred to as a creepypasta — and it was adapted into a TV series by the SyFy cable channel in 2016.
The quality of creepypastas, like any internet content, has always been…mixed. The term had only just been coined on 4chan in mid-2007 when people started making parodies, some of which have endured for longer than the best-known serious examples of the form. For example, “THEN WHO WAS PHONE” and “man door hand hook car door,” from 2008 and 2012, respectively:
It’s not surprising that “creepypasta” caught on faster than “copypasta,” when it’s just an internet-specific term for an old, old concept: the urban legend, the campfire story, the scary chain email. “man door hand hook car door” is itself a goofy update of the urban legend often known as “The Hook,” catalogued online by Snopes in 1998.
Pre-internet, urban legends often dealt with situations that symbolized the new freedoms and responsibilities that come with being a teenager: dating, babysitting, having your own car. In the terminally online age, most creepypastas focus on technology and pop culture, digging into how the things that are familiar and comforting to a lot of people are not actually ever under our control.
Anyway, bringing it back to that Twitter Comms tweet…
“Copypasta” is just such an odd word to see in this context. It feels more accurate to call what’s been happening on Twitter astroturfing, the age-old practice of faking grassroots support for a certain political position, rather than posting copypastas. You could even just straight-up call it spam.
Maybe whoever wrote that tweet used the word copypasta because it’s literally accurate — the statements have been copied and pasted over and over again — but that ignores the fact that “copypasta” and “creepypasta” have always referred to a short piece of writing with a specific point of view that is understood to not be the true sentiments of the poster. It’s like the literary principle of separating the narrator or speaker from the author, even if the narrator and the author are technically the same person, which often happens in creative nonfiction.
In a way, using the word copypasta could downplay the seriousness of what’s going on, which is a coordinated attempt to discredit social justice actions, according to Brandi Collins-Dexter of the racial justice nonprofit Color Of Change. Because copypastas have historically been considered lighthearted jokes, deploying that term in this context obscures the fact that there’s no comedy here. It’s just a political tactic — and one that could serve the same purpose as pre-internet urban legends like the LSD tattoo hoax, which tried to convince parents that strangers were getting their kids hooked on drugs. Here, the messages stoke the same kind of fears that creepypastas do (any sense of control you have is an illusion), with a specific political agenda (leftists are destroying America) that goes way beyond, “Hey, wouldn’t it be spooky if…?”
Or maybe this is just another example of a something that has existed on the internet for years suddenly becoming a part of political discourse. But that would imply that what happens on the internet is somehow separate from real life, which I hope we can all agree is not true. Anything that happens because a group of people came together to create something and spread a message has history-altering potential, especially when the speed and scope of the internet is involved.
Header collage images by fragranceum senior, Immo Wegmann, ETA+, and Markus Spiske on Unsplash.