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The YouTube Chain Letter That Promises Kids Magic iPads

The videos steer copypasta in a disquietingly commercial direction.
A kid with an iPad. ​Image: ​Marcus Kwan/Flickr

​Kiss your hand five times and look under your pillow

Kiss your hand five times and repost this 2x you will find a pink i Pad under your pillow

Kiss your hand 5 times than look under your pillow and you will find a pink ipad

Say Selena Gomez 3x and don't talk till you post this on a video

Have you tried it yet? I'm still stuck with my old iPhone 4.

Texts like the ​above surface again and again in YouTube comments. They appear in different poorly-spelled permutations, posted under videos with titles like "Look under your pillow…", "Kiss your hand 5 times" and "How to get a free Pink iPhone Under Your Pillow!" (the device in question shifts between iPhones and iPads, but is always Apple branded and almost invariably pink).

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The  video​s the comments are posted to act as replies to the original text, spawning further copy-pasted comments underneath from users hoping to get an iPad too. Most of the clips date from this year, are under a minute long, and star children who appear to be far younger than the user age limit of 13 in YouTube's polici​es.

Some videos just show a child talking about how much they want an iPad. Others feature kids saying "iPad" or "iPhone" ten times and crossing their fingers. One very young-looking YouTuber called  Skate​ Boarder questions whether or not it will work, then promises to show the result in a follow up video.

They usually cut off before the big reveal, declining to show whether the ritual has actually worked. The filmmakers, however young, have already grasped a basic tenet of marketing: keep the viewer wanting more.

It's hard to work out where the pink iPad chain comments started from. The ritual–kiss your hand, say "iPad" a few times, repost and wait for a reward–follows the formula of viral co​pypasta, blocks of text copy-pasted and circulated on forums and social media platforms.

But the pink iPad example being shared by kids now steers copypasta in a commercial direction. It could function as a kind of unofficial ad for Apple, aimed at the notoriously hard-to-reach under-13s market.

Back when I was 12 I shared bland, benign friendship copypasta via texts on a Nokia 8210. I found one I remember receiving listed in a 2003  aca​demic paper exploring the "sociolinguistics of young people's text-messaging":

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I believe friends are like quiet angels who lift our feet when our wings forget how to fly! Send to 4 friends and don't send back and see what happens in 4 days

I recall feeling oddly touched by its sincerity, and forwarding it on despite my chronic lack of phone credit.

Like this example, a lot of copypasta offers little more than the promise of good l​uck if passed on, and the threat of bad luck should readers refuse to.

Some draw on the superstitions associated with creep​ypasta, copypasta's sinister cousin. Numerous YouTube comment chains promise a swift and p​ainful death if you fail to pass them on: they posit themselves as toxic media in the mode of Videodrome, or Infinite Jest, or The Ring. Indeed, the prospect of Samara crawling out of a TV seems no more or less likely than an iPad magically appearing under a pillow.

ヾ(❛ε❛")ʃ SPOOKY SCARY SKELETONS SEND SHIVERS DOWN YOUR SPINE SHRIEKING SKULLS WILL SHOCK YOUR SOUL SEAL YOUR DOOM TONIGHT ヾ(❛ε❛")ʃ

Copypasta functions as the original clickbait, relying on marketing tactics co-opted by children and forum trolls to make the reader laugh, instill panic, or just lure people into sharing with the promise of free stuff. It represents marketing at its lowest common denominator, a children's primer for the grown-up world of "One Weird Tip"s and phishing scams.

But for all its ability to get users banned from forums for posting block text, copypasta is not the same as spam. This is what makes it interesting: where spam is automated, copypasta is resolutely human. It tries to justify itself ("it actually works") and begs you not to stop reading. It signals a collision of feckless tab-hopping, human hope—and, in the pink iPad case, the vague promise of a free Apple product.

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Chain correspondence even before the internet has a history of commercialisation and moneymaking. Some of the earliest​ examples were pyramid schemes, "gifting circles," "prosperity clubs," and business opportunities the reader simply could not afford to ignore. Perhaps this is why they took off during the Depression: the "Send-​a-​Dime" letter originated in Denver in 1935, promising an eventual payout of $1562.50.

★ ° ☾ ☆ ★ :. . • ○ ° ★ . * . . ¸ . ° ¸. * ● ¸ . …somewhere ° ☾ ° ¸. ● ¸ * :. . ¸ . ● ★ ★☾ . ● ¸ . ★ ° . • * . ☾ ° * . ☾ ° ¸. …in a parallel universe* ● ¸ ° ☾ °☆ ★ ° . . . ☾ °☆ . * ● ¸ . ★ ° :. . • ○ °★ . * . . ¸. * ● ¸ . …you are reading ° ☾ ★ °● ¸ . ★ ° :. . • ○ ° ¸.● ° ☾ ★ * :. . ¸ . ● ¸ * …an article about copypasta

But despite the chain letter's commercial roots, I find the iPad videos disquieting in their desperate need for a specifically branded product. It's not to say I wouldn't have done anything to get an iPad, had I been born a decade later. But I marvel at how copypasta has metamorphosed into something that, to me now, seems a lot more cynical.

It mimics the "share-to-win" competitions you see on Facebook (despite being  aga​inst official policies): spread the word, tell your friends, the more you share the better your chances. The only difference is the bizarre leap of faith required to imagine an iPad will appear like money from the Tooth Fairy.

Nevertheless, a bit of that old superstition still plagues me. Having read through many copypasta while researching this piece, and not sent even one of them on, I contemplate the prospect of being visited by bad luck tonight, or perhaps a spooky skeleton.

If I do not live to write again, dear readers, remember me. And share this article with at least five acquaintances, or the same might happen to you….