Acopypasta is a block of textcopied and pasted to the Internet andsocial 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 anInternet meme.
The termcopypasta is derived from the computer interface term "copy and paste",[1] the act of selecting a piece of text and copying it elsewhere. Usage of the word can be traced to an anonymous4chan thread from 2006.[2][3]Merriam-Webster recorded it as appearing onUsenet andUrban Dictionary for the first time that year.[1]
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 theUnited States Navy SEALs to an unidentified "kiddo". Written in a manner similar to a non-seriousdeath 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-themedimageboard OperatorChan, although the earliest known usage of the copypasta was on4chan on November 11, 2010.[4]
In 2019, the copypasta appeared in the alleged manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of theChristchurch mosque shootings. Some media outlets reported the copypasta as fact, for example publishing that Tarrant was "a navy seal with over 300 confirmed kills".[5]
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.
TheBee Movie copypasta is the entirescreenplay of the 2007 animated filmBee Movie, though this is sometimes shortened to just the introductory monologue. Use of theBee Movie's script as a copypasta began in 2013, when users posted it onto websites such asReddit andTumblr,[6] and it was popularized when edits of the film were first uploaded to YouTube in late 2016.[7]
"A drive into deep left field by Castellanos" is a quote fromThom Brennaman, an Americansports commentator for theMajor League Baseball team theCincinnati Reds. The quote and copypasta originated during a broadcast of a game between the Cincinnati Reds and theKansas City Royals on 19 August 2020, when Brennaman uttered a homophobic slur on ahot mic. When he was apologizing later in the broadcast, Reds playerNick Castellanos hit ahome run, prompting Brennaman to deliver aplay-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".[8]ESPN'sPablo Torre later remarked that it "was like listening to the band play on as theTitanic was sinking. Except the band was also somehowthe iceberg."[9]
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 thePhilippines, Filipino actorMon Confiado filed acyberlibel complaint against acontent creator who posted the "Flying Lotus" copypasta, substitutingFlying Lotus with the actor's name. The copypasta narrates an encounter with a well-known person behaving badly in a grocery store.[10][11]
In computing, copypasta can refer to a piece ofcode that was copied and pasted.[12] 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"[13] (suggesting it was not originally authored) and correction of a "copypasta mistake"[14] where code was copied and not correctly amended.
