Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2014; the follower, retweet and favourite counts it cites are from that month. Twitter has since been renamed X, and favourites are now called likes.
Who would have thought that Chris Scott (@iamchrisscott), an ordinary Twitter user, would end up in TV studios because of a joke he posted on the social network, after becoming famous, though not before being caught up in a major controversy?
It all began on 15 May, when Chris posted this tweet:
Oh hi Becky who refused to kiss me during spin the bottle in 6th grade & now wants to play FarmVille, looks like tables have fucking turned
— Chris Scott (@iamchrisscott) May 15, 2014
At first the tweet got only a handful of retweets and favourites, since he had about 1,000 followers on Twitter. In other words, it was just one tweet among many, so Chris Scott forgot about it.
A few months later, Chris realised that the tweet had been shared more than 20,000 times and “plagiarised” by hundreds of people on the network, and even translated into Spanish (among other languages). And, as Business Insider reports, someone even tried to accuse him of plagiarism, of stealing the joke from a TV comedy show that Chris says he has never seen.
But how did it all start, and how did it end?
Mary Charlene, a well-known comedian with 160,000 followers on Twitter, shared Chris’s tweet properly, crediting him. From that moment on, her followers began retweeting it, and a snowball started rolling that seemed to have no end. Chris began to receive praise for the wit of his joke and for how much people had laughed at his tweet.
Chris then decided to search for his joke and saw how prone Twitter users are to grab something funny and try to pass themselves off as its authors.
Hundreds of Twitter users had copied the joke word for word or changed it slightly. After them came websites and blogs, which also helped themselves to the joke without ever crediting its original author.
Even apparently serious Facebook pages took it upon themselves to post the joke on their walls, racking up plenty of likes, but none of them credited the author.
The tweet travelled from the US to Germany, Spain, Latin America and even South Africa.
But then…
Along came Jordan Carlos, a comedian with 60,000 followers who appears on the MTV show “Guy Code”. In a tweet, he accused Chris of plagiarising a joke he himself had told on one of the episodes, and said he would go through all the tapes of the show to prove it.
Chris insisted he had never seen the show, and it left him worried that he might indeed have repeated a joke he had heard from someone else.
Jordan Carlos’s followers started badgering Chris, accusing him of plagiarism.
Jordan Carlos was slow to say anything more on Twitter, so a worried Chris asked him whether he had found the joke in the recordings yet.
In the end, Jordan Carlos apologised to Chris and admitted that he had not told the joke, and that the idea really had been Chris’s own.
Celebrities with huge numbers of followers kept sharing the tweet until it reached its current 22,000 retweets and more than 30,000 favourites. Chris has been invited by several TV networks, including the BBC, to be interviewed, while Jordan Carlos has seen a significant drop in his number of Twitter followers for such a blunder.
Chris Scott told Business Insider that the whole thing had been very new and strange for him, especially the part about being accused of plagiarising his own joke.
He says people on social media are not aware of what plagiarism is, or of what is right or wrong. He has seen first-hand how small users and even big media outlets are capable of plagiarism, taking something that does not belong to them and letting their followers believe it is their own work.
And that is the eternal struggle on the internet. Almost everyone likes being “copied” and having their work recognised with due credit to the author, but nobody likes having their work stolen without the original author of the piece, phrase, article or whatever it may be being acknowledged. And it is true that the situation can become incredibly comical, especially when some fool accuses you of copying something from the very person who copied it from you.
This story was originally published by Business Insider and has been adapted.
Featured image: freestocks.org, CC0 1.0, via Flickr.
