A New Zealand bank is at the center of one of the weirdest freedom of speech debates likely happening in the world right now, as it’s trying to remove sexually explicit memes from the internet depicting its cute mascot, Buck the Sheep.
Kiwibank unveiled a new cartoon mascot named Buck, an adorable sheep with vibrant green wool, kind of giving it the look of a My Little Pony spinoff character. The internet, being the perv freak show that it is, immediately turned Buck into a sexual icon, thirsting over the animated livestock, posting various sexually explicit things about Buck’s alluring looks.
Kiwibank panicked and started dishing out copyright takedown notices to anyone posting anything it deemed too horny in regards to its green cartoon sheep. The company scrubbed images of its prized sheep from social media outlets, leaving behind messages that read “this media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”
A Bank’s Cute Sheep Mascot Is Now at the Center of a Free Speech Fight
In a perfect example of the Streisand effect in full effect, Kiwibank’s attempt to silence the Internet’s horniness only brought the whole thing more attention, eventually garnering the attention of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, inspiring thousands of more users to flood their respective social media feeds with even more degenerate fan art.
New Zealand’s Free Speech Union has released an open letter accusing Kiwibank of illegal censorship. The group argues that using copyright law to squash parody, commentary, and memes violates fair use principles. “Copyright protects creative work from being copied,” the union said, “not brands from being laughed at.”
Kiwibank seems to have taken a different tactic, scrubbing Buck from all recent marketing materials rather than going after the memes, in an apparent attempt to kill the source rather than the memes themselves.
I don’t know how to do this in this article, so I’ll just copy and paste the final line from this CTVNews.ca article about this story, because it’s exactly the way that you would imagine a news outlet would awkwardly end a news story about people sexualizing a green cartoon sheep bank mascot: “New Zealand has long been known for having more sheep than people, with a ratio of 4.5 sheep to every person as of 2025.”
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