• Jerry Media, the advertising firm that promoted Fyre Festival, is under fire for its F---Jerry Instagram account.
• The account ultimately amassed more than 14 million followers by posting screenshots of tweets without attributing them to the comedians and content creators who made them in the first place.
• After the Fyre Festival fiasco covered by the Netflix and Hulu documentaries, they've rallied against Jerry media through the #F---F---Jerry hashtag.
• The company archived hundreds of posts that didn't credit the original creators, Jerry Media's CEO told INSIDER
• People want the company to compensate those whose content it uses.

Jerry Media — the digital advertising company and controversial internet brand that promoted Fyre Festival — is on the retreat.

On Saturday, Elliot Tebele, the founder of the F---Jerry Instagram brand at the heart of the company, said he'd stop his long-running practice of using other people's content to build his own brand. F---Jerry often posts screenshots of funny tweets, sometimes without attributing the original writer, to gain followers and make money off them with sponsored posts.

"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," Tebele wrote in a Medium post.

Fury from the creators of those posts — as well as people upset about the company's involvement in Fyre Festival — led to an enormous backlash against Tebele and Jerry Media. In the past week, the company has hidden more than 260 posts on F---Jerry, according to the social media analytics site PHP Statistics. And while the profile normally gains thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — of followers a day, it's lost around 200,000 since Thursday, according to PHP Statistics. Tebele has also made his popular Twitter profile private.

Mick Purzycki, the CEO of Jerry Media, confirmed to INSIDER that it archived a number of posts on the F---Jerry Instagram page.

"With this issue resurfacing in the past week, we decided to review some of our older posts to identify ones without clear credit," he wrote in an email. "We did not delete the posts, but archived them, so we can repost them if we can determine the proper attribution. No one had complained about these posts, we just thought this was the best course of action."

F---Jerry helped turn Jerry Media into an online empire

Since the release of the documentaries "Fyre Fraud" on Hulu and "Fyre" on Netflix, Jerry Media's flagship Instagram page, F---Jerry, has come under renewed criticism.

F---Jerry's Instagram page has been key to the company's growth. The page first went viral in 2013 and 2014, when founder Elliot Tebele posted screenshots of memes and joke tweets without crediting the people who first posted them, suggesting that he came up with the jokes in the first place.

Tebele isn't the only person to use the strategy for online growth. It was also pursued by Josh Ostrovsky, also known as The Fat Jewish, as well as other meme accounts on Instagram. BuzzFeed's Instagram account is almost entirely screenshots of funny tweets, although it always credits the person who originally posted the tweet.

But the strategy angered many of the professional and aspiring comedians who made that content in the first place. Especially because it is successful. F---Jerry has more than 14 million followers, enough to pull in tens of thousands of dollars for a single sponsored post.

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Over the past few years, Tebele has marketed that strategy as digital savvy, turning the F---Jerry brand into a powerhouse digital advertising agency, Jerry Media, that has done business with brands like Comedy Central, Burger King, and Bumble. In late 2016 and early 2017, he worked with Fyre Festival and came up with a strategy to market it on Instagram and turn it into a viral sensation.

Jerry Media's work on Fyre Festival created a new backlash

Tebele's role working for Fyre Festival has mostly flown under the radar since the festival crashed and burned in April 2017. Festival founder Billy McFarland has taken the brunt of the blame — he's currently serving a six-year prison term for fraud.

But Hulu's documentary, released earlier this month, highlights the role of Tebele and other marketers in advertising the festival. Though Jerry Media, Tebele also co-produced the Netflix documentary, where digital media strategists who were interviewed lay the blame om McFarland for hoodwinking them. At the same time, the marketers who worked on the festival doubted whether McFarland could pull off what he promised, and deleted online comments criticizing Fyre Festival's poor planning.

Read more: ‘Do you think I would get laid more by models?’: A glimpse at Billy McFarland’s pre-Fyre Festival life

Since the two documentaries were released, comedians and critics have renewed their fight against Tebele. Megh Wright, an editor at New York magazine, began the #F---F---Jerry hashtag on Twitter. With it, comedians are trading stories of times Tebele plagiarized their content without credit, and sometimes laughed them off when they asked for it. Celebrities including Patton Oswalt and Billy Eichner have also joined the charge, asking people to unfollow the Instagram account.

Since the backlash began, F---Jerry archived hundreds of old Instagram posts, lost hundreds of thousands of followers, and lost its advertising deal with Comedy Central, as Wright reported at Vulture.

"The response to the campaign has been overwhelmingly positive, and that's been really encouraging and fun to see," Wright told INSIDER. "It's gratifying to see so many different comedians unite around a cause they all care about and previously thought was too huge and hopeless to speak out against."

Purzycki told INSIDER that the company has made a "proactive effort" to credit people whose tweets it copies.

"In the last couple years we have made a proactive effort to credit everyone for their work," he said. "We have also, as a policy, made sure we are responsive to creators whenever they have reached out to us about posts. In most instances, they are excited about being reposted, because there is great value to this promotion. Very rarely does a creator reach out to us and request that a post be taken down."

F---Jerry has a long way to go to regain trust

But though F---Jerry's Instagram account has, for the past few months, often posted screenshots that didn't crop out the names of the Twitter users making jokes, it has still continued to use some screenshots and memes without attribution.

And even if the company stopped taking tweets without attribution, it may not be enough. The account even sells the screenshots to make money with sponsored posts without compensating the people who actually come up with the jokes.

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