Comedians across the country are launching a campaign to take down a hugely famous Instagram account, FuckJerry.
The page run by founder Elliot Tebele 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. Comedy Central has since decided to pull its placements from the page.
Now, the hashtag #fuckfuckjerry is spreading throughout social media like wildfire, with comics including John Mulaney calling for the public to stop following the account.
Last week, comedian Vic Berger tweeted out screenshots of his conversation with a FuckJerry content officer who he claims stole his videos without crediting him. The only response offered to Berger after he complained appeared to be “shut up.”
On Saturday, Tebele addressed the controversy over his page in a Medium post, promising to do right by comedians going forward.
“Effective immediately, we will no longer post content when we cannot identify the creator, and will require the original creator’s advanced consent before publishing their content to our followers,” he wrote. “It is clear that attribution is no longer sufficient, so permission will become the new policy.”
However, this isn’t the first time Tebele has landed in hot water. In 2017, FuckJerry helped to promote the ultra-luxurious Fyre Festival that spiraled into a train wreck. Jerry Media then produced “Fyre,” the Netflix documentary on the fiasco.