I’m not mad about Instagram (there, I said it), although I will pop on now and then to judge people and their vapid cries for attention, and enjoy a few memes.

Mostly the latter, really.

Here’s the thing about those meme accounts with millions of followers, though – many of them are just outright stealing content from other creators, and they’re making a boatload of money doing it.

Leading the charge is FuckJerry, with a whopping 14 million followers at the time of writing. You can expect that number to drop in the coming days and weeks, as a movement called #FuckFuckJerry gathers prominence.

Over to Huff Post:

Comedians across the country are launching a campaign to take down a hugely famous Instagram account, FuckJerry.

The page run by founder Elliot Tebele [pictured up top] as part of his company, Jerry Media, has come under fire by celebrities who are outraged over its reposting of their jokes without any credit, essentially stealing them.

The movement began after Vulture’s Megh Wright explained in a report the account’s history of plagiarizing puns while scoring thousands of dollars in ad revenue from sponsors…

Now, the hashtag #fuckfuckjerry is spreading throughout social media like wildfire…

A tweet by comedian Vic Berger also helped fan the flames, displaying how the account reacts when you ask them to credit or remove work that is plagiarised.

Wow, who would have thought that the account that helped to promote Fyre Festival would be run by dickheads?

Sadly, Jerry Media produced Fyre, the documentary on the fiasco, which is pretty good viewing.

More bad news – Tebele’s firm is now representing the world-record Instagram egg account, which appears to have inked a Super Bowl-related ad deal which could number in the millions of dollars.

Still, the highlight of the whole affair might just be the brutal takedown video that Berger made about FuckJerry, with some basic editing and a real vendetta.

Given that they’re making monstrous sums of money for these sponsored posts (some people estimate up to $75 000 a post, whilst others say it’s closer to $30 000 a post), it’s no wonder these creators are pissed off.

FuckJerry: Easier To Steal#FuckFuckJerry pic.twitter.com/MTAhN0t5Uo

— Vic Berger IV (@VicBergerIV) February 1, 2019

With the backlash growing, and their follower count taking a serious hit, Elliot Tebele was finally forced to issue a response.

Here’s The Verge:

[He said] that his company will no longer post content without being able to identify its creator and without that creator’s express and advance consent. The change comes in response to backlash from the comedy world, which has long despised accounts like Fuckjerry’s for profiting off jokes, memes, and other creative works on the internet without approval and, in earlier years, without crediting an original creator at all.

“In the past few years, I have made a concerted, proactive effort to properly credit creators for their work. We have also updated our policies to make sure we are responsive to creators whenever they have reached out to us about posts,” Tebele wrote in a post published to Medium this afternoon.

“It hasn’t been a perfect system, but I do feel it was a significant improvement, as many of my peers have approached these issues in the same way. Given the conversations over the past few days, and the issues that have come to light, it is clear however, that we need to do better.”

You sure do, and I’m not sure that apology is going to cut it with many. Once again, here’s the FuckJerry account, if you want to pop past and judge.

Then again, the Fat Jewish has bounced back from his plagiarism controversy, so I guess people online just want their laughs, even if those laughs come from accounts where the content is stolen from others in the name of profit.

[source:huffpost&verge]