Someone is trying to stop Johny Johny Yes Papa memes
Cherish your Johny and Papa content while it's still up, because memes are rapidly getting removed from Twitter for copyright violations.
You've probably stumbled across at least one Johny Johny Yes Papa meme while scrolling through your feed in the past week -- the macrocephalic child who hungers for sugar and his tyrannical Papa who often catches him telling lies danced their way right into our creeped out hearts.
But Twitter has recently removed a vast swath of the most viral memes about Johny and his family.
As Mashable reported on Wednesday, Twitter limited one of the largest and most recent viral tweets about the series. Instead of displaying the infamous video of Johny and Papa doing body rolls, viewers get a graphic that says, "This video has been removed in response to a report from the copyright holder."
The video has also been removed from Billion Surprise Toys' YouTube channel, which created the video originally aimed at a child audience.
Other tweets -- including a parody that set Johny and Papa's sugary confrontation to pumping EDM -- also lost their embedded videos.
A version of rave Johny is still available on YouTube.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
And @YesPapaNoSugar, a shitposting account that posted from the perspective of Papa, was deleted entirely. The account gained more than 14,600 followers in just two days, but Twitter started removing Johny Johny videos from its tweets on Thursday morning.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Many screenshots of the deleted tweets have been reposted to Instagram, like @YesPapaNoSugar's viral pinned tweet.
And although the original dancing video has been scrubbed from Twitter and YouTube, it's still making its rounds on Instagram.
When asked about the removals, a Twitter spokesperson said there was "no comment about this individual case" but pointed to the company's copyright policy.
The policy's guidelines note that "not all unauthorized uses for copyrighted materials are infringements" and it protects parody, newsfeed, fan, and commentary accounts as long as they follow certain guidelines.
United States laws also protect copyrighted content that falls into "fair use." Twitter states that fair use is determined by the purpose and character of the use, the effect on the copied work's value, and whether the copy will "harm the potential market for copyrighted work by effectively creating a substitute or replacement for the work."
Many Johny Johny tweets are still intact, like this thread theorizing that Johny was abused. Instead of embedding the videos directly into the tweet, @pakistanner seemed to find a loophole by posting a screen recording of an Instagram video.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Some screenshots from the videos are still visible.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
And unlike @marcos_delt's EDM parody, a version of the video with Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name" can still be viewed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The subreddit r/JohnJohnYesPapa, which has been memeing for four years, is also still intact.
According to Twitter's fair use policy, "Fair use determinations are made on a case by case basis, and there is no clear formula to determine whether a use may be found to be fair."
Billion Surprise Toys, the channel behind the kid videos, has also disabled playback embedded on websites other than YouTube.
It wouldn't be surprising if Billion Surprise Toys, which has nearly 16 million subscribers and has the potential to make up to millions of dollars per year, according to Social Blade, is trying to crack down on the memes.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Billion Surprise Toys has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
However, if there's anything that we've learned from Beyoncé's publicist failing to take down unflattering pictures of her Super Bowl performance, it's that you really can't stop the spread of a good meme. Especially if it's weird as hell.
UPDATE: Aug. 30, 2018, 1:58 p.m. PDT
The video parodying Johny Johny with a Rage Against The Machine song was taken down with the same copyright notice.
Twitter usually leaves parodies alone -- for example, a viral video that combined a scene from Captain America: Civil War with dialogue from Billy on the Street inspired an iconic meme that was widely recreated last month.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
You'd think that the Johny Johny memes fall under Twitter's fair use and parody policies, but apparently nothing gets past Papa.
