About

"Sometimes I Just Want To Copy Someone Else’s Status, Word For Word, And See If They Notice" is a copypasta that virally spread through Twitter and Facebook in late August 2010. The humorous, self-referential text inspired over 1,500 replicate instances of the identical sentence in less than 12 hours. Due to its self-referential nature (i.e., a tweet on the subject of tweeting), it can be seen as an example of meta-discussion^[8].

Origin

The earliest known instance of the copypasta tweet was posted by Twitter user JBtoColorado^[1] on August 18th, 2010:

sometimes I want to just copy someone else's tweet word for word just to see if they would notice…less than a minute ago via web

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Keren ✔ ß℮ℓїℯßℯґ ♡ ♫
JBtoColorado

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Four days later on August 24th, Twitter user DazWolf^[2] retweeted the message but it largely went unnoticed. On August 26th, Twitter user Tim Waters^[3] (@tim_waters) from Leeds, UK retweeted the same message at 10:42 a.m. (EST). Water's tweet brought the copypasta into spotlight in the United Kingdom and the trend continued to spread through Facebook status updates.

At 10:52 a.m. (EST), @elspethjane of New York City tweeted the message to her 3,100 followers, quickly picking up coverage from several internet culture blogs like Huffington Post^[4], Urlesque^[5] and TechCrunch^[6] among others. The meme was also cited as an example in the article "What Defines a Meme?" published in May 2011 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.^[7]

On Twitter

External References

^[1] Twitter – JBtoColorado's Tweet

^[2] Twitter – DazWolf's Tweet

^[3] Twitter – TimWater's Tweet

^[4] Huffington Post – Sometimes I Just Want to Copy Someone Else's Status

^[5] Urlesque – Sometimes I Just Want to Copy Someone Else's Status

^[6] TechCrunch – Twitter Human Virus

^[7] Smithsonian Magazine – What Defines a Meme?

^[8] Wikipedia – Meta-discussion