Copypasta
viral block of text
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. Merriam-Webster recorded it as 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 was "a navy seal with over 300 confirmed kills".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Copypasta” as viral block of text. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as viral block of text. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60738916. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2010 and 2019.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Copypasta” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.