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2006·Early YouTube

Copypasta

Text that spreads by being pasted rather than linked, and the only truly platform-independent internet form.

You might remember it as Bee Movie script, Navy Seal copypasta

A post

The story

What this was

A post classified under marine-life.

It first appeared in 2006, during early YouTube.

It is the internet's folk-literature mechanism, and it is much older than the web — the same texts circulated as faxlore and before that as photocopied office jokes. It is also the one meme format that no platform change can kill, because it requires nothing but a text field. Creepypasta, the horror genre, is a direct derivative and named after it.

Individual copypastas have become fixtures with their own histories — a chest-beating military threat, a Reddit post about the ownership of certain aquatic mammals, the complete script of an animated film about bees posted at length into unrelated comment sections. The form has outlasted every site it was invented on.

You were there

More from 2006

The same internet

Early YouTube

More like this

Related

Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A post classified under marine-life.
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