Clippy Campaign

In August 2025, YouTuber Louis Rossmann started a grassroots solidarity visibility campaign (tentatively named the Clippy Campaign), wherein participants changed their profile pictures on social media platforms in protest of unethical practices by corporations across industries. Users changed their profile pictures to a "Clippy", referring to an image of the "Clippit" avatar of Office Assistant as seen in Microsoft Office from 2000 to 2003.

Campaign

Origins

On 7 August 2025, YouTuber Louis Rossmann uploaded a video titled "Change your profile picture to clippy. I'm serious" and encouraged his viewers to stand up against unethical practices of technology corporations (and companies in other industries) which violated consumer rights or otherwise proved detrimental to their paying customers. In the video, he suggested that members who join the movement could change their profile pictures on YouTube and other platforms to a Clippy, on the grounds that such an avatar was a fitting symbol, that avatars with a common theme would help participants recognize each other, and that the collective usage of the avatar in great numbers would raise questions among others and potentially draw attention to the movement.^[1]^[2]

Rossmann stated that educating the public and spreading awareness of these issues was the primary motivation behind his call to action, and while winning the "legislative battle" would be a favorable end, it was not an imperative end at the first stage of the campaign.^[1]

The scope of the campaign intersects with the general resistance to anti-ownership practices by companies that have become more common throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, such as denying paying customers the right to repair the products that they had purchased. In the video, Rossmann offered a non-exhaustive list of grievances that people have faced, as possible reasons for aligning with the campaign, shown below in brief (see Examples for details):

Companies can change the terms of a sale retroactively without legal repercussions.
Companies can lock users out of a device they already paid for until a novel subscription fee is paid (tantamount to installing ransomware).
The comments sections of many YouTube channels frequently contain malicious comments that normalize sex trafficking, posted by bot accounts.
Companies can deny a user's right to repair something damaged in transit (i.e., not by the user), even when the user is willing to purchase needed parts from them, and then threaten legal action for asking them about the decision.
Companies can conduct psychological experiments on their customers without their consent, without legal repercussions.

Developments

Rossmann later uploaded a clarifying video on 12 August 2025, titled "You Changed Your Profile to Clippy: Now What? 📎📎📎", to elaborate on the meaning of the movement for participants and outsiders, and to call participants to action, offering ways in which they could actively contribute to creating effective results that could counteract or make conspicuous the exploitative and dishonest business practices they are protesting. Rossmann stated in the video that the act of changing one's profile picture is not the goal of the movement, but a prerequisite for realizing bigger changes; it serves as a simple task that gets users invested in the movement and increases its visibility, so that even if a participant is not able to effectuate much change on their own, they can make people who are capable of more tangible influence aware of the movement and utilize their assistance.^[2]

Rossmann uploaded a follow-up video four days later, on 16 August 2025, titled "Progress of clippy movement one week in", in which he remarked on the rapid growth of the movement and thanked participants for actively working and making a difference, and not simply changing their profile pictures without doing anything else.^[3]

Why Clippy

Clippy as a symbol of escalating overreach

Rossman uses Clippy to show how technology used to work purely for its intended purpose, in contrast to dark patterns that are now widespread.

Change your profile picture to clippy. I'm serious 1:08

Whether or not you like Clippy, [...] the one thing that you could say—unlike Facebook, who is trying to profit off of young girls that feel suicidal: Clippy simply wanted to help.
He might have been annoying, but he just wanted to help.
There were no ulterior motives.
If you told Clippy you were having a bad day, he wasn't going to use that information to try and figure out which advertiser to sell you to, nor was he trying to steal your personal data to get you to purchase other Microsoft products. He had no ulterior motives, he was simply there to help.
[...] Clippy wouldn't even read the contents of your letter.

Impact

Rossmann hopes that the group awareness created by the campaign will allow people to take action more quickly, due to already knowing that others around them are in alignment. Already it has been seen that many users on YouTube and other social media sites have taken part in the campaign. Some are even taking action to further spread word of the movement in hopes it will eventually get the attention of legislation, tech companies, etc.^{[citation needed]}

You Changed Your Profile to Clippy: Now What? 📎📎📎 4:25

But if all of them know at the same time that we're on the same page:
We are tired of living in an anti-ownership society—check.
We are tired of living in a society where we subscribe to everything and we own nothing—check.
We are tired of being told it cost $8,000 to fix a f[---]ing power button—check.
[...]
If every single one of these people were not only on the same page, but knew they were on the same page, maybe each one in the chain would speak up when they otherwise wouldn't.
And when they're all moving together and all working together, what happens?
They choose a different vendor.

Within one week, there has already been visible progress due to this movement; namely, an increase in edits to consumerrights.wiki.

Progress of clippy movement one week in 1:06

We have something called Plausible. It's GDPR privacy-preserving analytics. [...Y]ou can see this jump over here [around 11 Aug] [...] also coincides with many articles that were incomplete, being edited to the point of being perfect[...]

As well as tangible progress outside of this wiki, the point of the movement is to encourage changes in individual lives so that these small changes accumulate:

Progress of clippy movement one week in 1:56

[A]nd I'm very excited, not just by this, but by all of the emails that I've received from you, where you've told me in your own personal life where you made a different decision to try and make a difference.

Examples

Rossmann provided some examples of motivations people might have to join the campaign in his first video. This is only a list of the example from that video; further examples can be found in hundreds of other videos posted on Rossmann's channel.

Companies can change the terms of a sale retroactively without legal repercussions. The example offered is Philips Hue changing the terms of service on smart light bulbs that were already purchased under different terms, thence requiring users to sign up for an account in order to use the light bulbs.^[4]^[5]^[6]

Companies can lock users out of a device they already paid for until a novel subscription fee is paid (tantamount to ransomware). The example offered is the smart-home company Futurehome pushing out a firmware update that disabled the smart-home devices of every customer; devices could only be re-enabled if the customer signed up for a new subscription that was not previously required.^[7]^[8]

The comments sections of many YouTube channels frequently contain malicious comments that normalize sex trafficking, posted by bot accounts.^[1] Massive botnets create autonomous accounts with profile pictures ostensibly featuring attractive or scantily dressed women, and when their channels are viewed, the user is greeted with links to websites that contain adult content, enticing users to fall for phishing scams.^[9]. Such comments are extremely pervasive, often showing up just seconds after a video is uploaded, seemingly only ever deleted by the manual review of the owner of the video rather than by server-side action; their extent is met contrariwise by reports of legitimate comments from real users being completely censored (not being visible to anyone other than the poster of the comment), even including the user who uploaded the video itself.^{[citation needed]} Rossmann points out in the aforementioned video that some of these bot accounts can bypass the filters by using pictures that are not actually of scantily dressed women, but can so appear to be when the image is small, such as when it is beside a comment; only when it is examined more closely, can it be shown to be an image of something else, such as a cat next to some pillows.^[1]

Companies can deny a user's right to repair something damaged in transit (i.e., not by the user), even when the user is willing to purchase needed parts from them, and then threaten legal action for asking them about the decision. The example offered is Cami Research accusing a user of harassment who was very professional over the phone, outright stating that because it values profit over users being able to repair products which they already purchased, it does not want customers to be able to repair them because if they repair the unit they already have, they would not buy a new one.^[10]

Companies can conduct psychological experiments on their customers without their consent, without legal repercussions. The example offered is Tado, a company that makes smart thermostats, which added a paywall to their devices, demanding a subscription fee, after customers had already bought their product (where the terms of the sale at the time of purchase indicated that there was no subscription fee). The paywall was actually fake; its purpose was to see how many customers would willingly go along with the additional payments. In essence, the company threatened to remove a service to induce a behavior on their customers.^[11] This is another example of retroactive amendments to the terms of products and services already sold in completion (see first point above).