For example, the highly successful tweet pictured above left is an almost verbatim copy of a very popular Tumblr post from a year ago. Berragan, who created Medieval Reacts, admits he had seen that post, as well as other images used on the account from Tumblr. But he says the majority of the account's images come from other sources.

"There was a Tumblr post and it had all these medieval images," he says. "There are loads of blogs and websites that have documented how weird they are in the past."

In fact, Medieval Reacts has suffered from being copied itself, with dozens of accounts springing up in response, all using essentially identical names and even avatars. "You get used to it," says Bartlett, "and we don't complain any more – we don't chase them."

McGregor claims that 95% of the content on Social Chain's internal accounts is original, though this number is contested by other members of the team, who suggest it is lower without committing to a figure. They also maintain that there are different levels of originality depending on the account, and point to Sims Logic and Hogwarts Logic as examples of more original accounts.

But even with these accounts, whether it's a Sims Logic tweet using a Tumblr post or a Hogwarts Logic tweet that came from another Tumblr post, it appears that taking content found on the web without attribution is not an uncommon practice at Social Chain. And in the case of this Grand National joke, the whole thing was lifted from another tweet less than 40 minutes after the original appeared.