The Two Teenagers Who Run the Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-2-teenagers-who-run-the-wildly-popular-twitter-feed-historyinpics/283291/?utm_content=buffer32d49&utm_source=twitter.com

by freshfey • 12 years ago

108 103 12 years ago

theatlantic.com

instakill• 12 years ago

Who really deserves the scorn—the two best players in the game or the people who own the stadium?

Are the two mutually excluded? I'm not sure about the platforms, but the owners of the account are definitely in the wrong. Ignorance doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to play within the bounds of the law.

yetanotherphd• 12 years ago

I think the only difference between these entrepreneurs and big businesses is that big businesses would say "talk to our lawyers" instead of "talk to our lawyers, lol".

That said, if they do get sued I'm not going to feel sorry for them.

digitalengineer5• 12 years ago

This: "The audiences that Di Petta and Cameron have built are created with the work of photographers who they don't pay or even credit. They don't provide sources for the photographs or the captions that accompany them. Sometimes they get stuff wrong and/or post copyrighted photographs. "

Combined with this: "I'm sure the majority of photographers would be glad to have their work seen by the massives."

Nothing 'new media' about it. Theft plain and simple.

burntsushi11• 12 years ago

Theft plain and simple.

Well, no, not plain and simple. At the worst, it's copyright infringement.

You may think this is a pedantic correction, and from your point of view, maybe it is. But it isn't for people who see intellectual property as unjust.

digitalengineer5• 12 years ago

No no, your right. I should have know better. My old company, Royalty Free Models, used to sell regular people for commercial photoshoots. I sold them with all rights included like a ShutterStock database with actual people. Even agency's don't understand copyrights...

archgrove3• 12 years ago

This trope is getting exceedingly tired, on par with the "taxation is theft", "atheism is a religion" and "Linux should be called GNU/Linux" brigades that often crop up in the appropriate discussions. Theft and "steal" have long been used outside of the OED definitions; I can be a "thief of time", "steal an idea", "steal a base" and so forth. "Theft" and "steal" are appropriate words for the behaviour of people who have decided, in defiance of the laws and remunerative structures society has constructed, that they're entitled to the work of people without giving anything back (apart from some advice like "I'm giving you free advertising", "find a new business model" or "this will actually help you in the long run"). Society has created intellectual property, in the same way it created physical property, and if you can steal the later, you can surely steal the former.

One other angle on this, for the "steal absolutely must deprive someone of something" view, well - something is actually lost, that cannot be replaced. The right of the IP creator to be repaid by the person who grabbed it. Many people say "Well, I'd never have bought it anyway". Whilst true for now, would it still be true in 1 year? 5? 10? Would you have bought it for your kids, or because a sequel came out that you do want to buy? By taking it, you rob the person of the ability to sell it to you in the future.

I think it's incumbent upon anyone who thinks "intellectual property is unjust" and who acts on this belief by just denying its existence, to propose and get support for a viable alternative for supporting the millions of people who depend on it for their livelihood. Otherwise, you're just an anarchist, burning the system down and denying any contribution to the people who have committed to a certain lifestyle on the guarantees currently provided by society.

GuiA2• 12 years ago

They don't provide sources for the photographs or the captions that accompany them. Sometimes they get stuff wrong and/or post copyrighted photographs.

I can reverse-search for any picture on Google Images and, with extremely high accuracy, find a picture's origins.

If this is something we deem as problematic, why not solve it at the source by having the service (i.e. Twitter) identify the images that are posted and properly credit them?

That'd be a neat startup idea actually (and it probably already exists in some form?) A service to which you send a picture, and it returns to you its copyright information. You could market it by doing things like writing a Twitter bot (named "HistoryInPicsCredits" or something) that automatically tweets copyright information of images posted by HistoryInPics.

kevinchen• 12 years ago

When you reverse-searched on Google Images, did you notice that their captions often distorted the facts or outright lied?

I think that's the bigger story here: it's not that "new media" or "kids these days" don't care about attribution for the sake of giving credit. The photos aren't attributed because it would be easier to find their contexts. If people know the facts, the account would be less interesting and therefore less popular.

virtuabhi• 12 years ago

Shouldn't this be considered "fair use"? A bunch of guys find some pictures on the internet. These pictures are not the originals but low-res jpegs. The pictures are saved on their machines (by the browser). Then the pictures are uploaded to Twitter. The source/photographer is provided with every picture (if info. is available). I don't understand how photographers are losing here? They are getting free publicity from the pictures which were already accessible to everyone.

chadwickthebold• 12 years ago

"free publicity"

Exposure doesn't put food on the table.

ama729• 12 years ago

They are getting free publicity

For that, they would have to be properly credited in the first place...

BeccaCory• 12 years ago

I don't think I agree with this. A lot of their pictures ARE public domain, and I have to say, the fact that a) they met through youtube and b) managed to create an organic following of nearly a million, not to mention the number of impressions each tweet gets, in a matter of months, is highly impressive. There are plenty of people who use pirated photos through twitter, and true, they are now making a profit from it, but think of the things YOU were doing when you were 17 years old.

doktrin• 12 years ago

It's quite possible to consider those facts in isolation.

What they have accomplished is impressive for 17 year olds, but it's very reasonable to acknowledge the moral (and legal) gray space their work occupies.

Moreover, it's possible to comment without bringing both of those facts up together. I know I'm not particularly interested in extolling the virtues of these particular individuals. It's just not interesting. Maybe the OP feels the same way?

mbateman2• 12 years ago

Di Petta's flip attitude towards copyright is contemptible. But it's true that it is often impractical to get information about creators and rights. I wonder part of the solution isn't some service that decreased the friction (by a lot) for looking up the relevant information. (As I'm typing this I realize this probably isn't a new thought.)

untitaker_• 12 years ago

Google's reverse image search and tineye.

pbhjpbhj6• 12 years ago

Couple of others:

http://karmadecay.com/ [reddit focussed]

http://saucenao.com/

Also there was http://www.gazopa.com/ but it's shutdown. These http://iqdb.org/, http://www.ascii2d.net/imagesearch/, are for anime/manga.

masklinn• 12 years ago

Di Petta's flip attitude towards copyright is contemptible. But it's true that it is often impractical to get information about creators and rights.

It sometimes is. Time and again, people have checked the pair's featured pictures and found sources in a few minutes.

mbateman2• 12 years ago

I totally agree. And again I don't want to excuse their behavior.

But it being inconsistently easy to find a source and copyright information is also a problem that it would be nice to have solved. That there's a lot of variance in this process is itself a disincentive to engaging in it.

It would be beneficial for everyone if, in general, finding sources was as easy as finding the images to begin with. There's no in principle reason (or is there?) why technology has to make content discovery easy and source discovery difficult, it just is that way right now.

jere6• 12 years ago

1.3 million followers, eh?

Aaannd my headlines-from-1914 bot has 11 followers. tl;dr I suppose.

digitalengineer5• 12 years ago

Well, it would help if you added your Twitter handle when saying something like that. Like the idea actually.

jere6• 12 years ago

I posted about it here before. It may be too dry, but I find it quite entertaining. https://twitter.com/NEWS_XX14

vijayr• 12 years ago

both ideas are interesting, but photos are more interesting than plain text. so don't feel bad :)

please post the links to the articles

bioinformatics• 12 years ago

Now you have 21.

drum• 12 years ago

Your articles are fine, but you're missing one key component...pictures. If each headline had a pic I bet you'd be doing much better

atestu• 12 years ago

To be fair, theirs isn't a bot.

calbear81• 12 years ago

I think I've seen a lot of the @earthpics photos on the Earthporn sub-reddit. A bot that scrapes that and cross posts the top photos to a twitter account might work.

Nicholas_C• 12 years ago

Sssshhhh, I'm working on that now.

evan_2• 12 years ago

Start re-posting their tweets on a halfway-popular account and see how quickly they learn about copyright.

smackfu5• 12 years ago

But all they care about is the follower count. Once it hits a million, they can sell off this account to someone who wants to monetize it.

I mean, they have no real attraction to "History in Pics" as a constant, or to any particular post. They just care about it as something that people seem to like to follow. If someone else rips off their content, I doubt that would have any impact at all.

evan_2• 12 years ago

You might have a point about the "History in Pics" account, I guess you would have to be competing with a newer account and outpace its follower count- or have an "Ad free History in Pics" account that catches traction or something. Or maybe they really wouldn't care at all, I don't know.

adventured• 12 years ago

It's against Twitter's terms to sell an account or username. Does Twitter commonly look the other way on this? Are there public examples of Twitter accounts being sold for a lot of money?

steveklabnik• 12 years ago

... aren't they already a more than halfway-popular account?

truxs• 12 years ago

So basically to start a successful account all you need to do is find a popular subreddit and upload most upvoted post on Twitter

smackfu5• 12 years ago

Not just that, the key is to already have followers on a separate account, and then you can cross post them to build up the new one.

fourstar• 12 years ago

Someone did that to a big subreddit I created. There are tons of copy-cats who are even using my trademarked name and Twitter won't do jack about it.

smackfu5• 12 years ago

The credit thing seems like a red herring. Either you have the license to the photo or you don't.

_delirium• 12 years ago

From an ethical perspective I often think credit in these cases is more important than licensing, at least for older stuff. If it's a photo from the 1930s, I honestly don't care if some great-grandnephew technically owns the copyright, but it would be nice to have an accurate caption. The licensing issue gets bigger in my mind the more recent the photos get.

dublinben• 12 years ago

I agree. I think that (mis)attribution is a much more fundamental crime than unauthorized reproduction. It's essentially fraud to pass these off as their own works, or with incorrect captions.

chc3• 12 years ago

There are a lot of opinions about the legitimacy of modern copyright laws, but almost everyone agrees that people deserve credit for their work as long as it is appreciated, so focusing on the latter addresses a more universal issue.

pbhjpbhj6• 12 years ago

Credit seems to matter.

When you see images on Google Image search you get an attribution - that seems the only difference legally between displaying the results of a db query for @HistoryPics twitter posts and displaying the results of a db query for "historic images" (say) on a search engines image search. Sure, the former has been more curated than the latter but having robots do your bidding doesn't appear in TRIPs agreements AFAIR.

dkrich• 12 years ago

I think we're in some kind of media bubble when a "news" website publishes stories about people who steal content and Tweet it. This feels like a lot of people chasing each other in circles without really producing any new content.

brucehart• 12 years ago

I stopped following accounts like this because of their promotion tactics. They retweet stuff from other accounts and then delete it 15 minutes later. If you look at the feed before subscribing, it looks like it is a bunch of interesting photos. Once you start following them, you see these lower quality retweets at the top of your feed that are deleted as soon as they start to get pushed down on subscriber timelines.

fr0sty2• 12 years ago

If you aren't un-following merely on principle, you can turn off re-tweets per followee. I find the feature very useful.

jordsmi• 12 years ago

Yea, this is one way they make money. They charge for retweets but then just delete after everyone sees it.

md224• 12 years ago

A recent tweet from Kyle Cameron's twitter feed:

"If The Wolf Of Wall Street doesn't inspire you to become successful, nothing will." [1]

Makes me a little sad.

[1] https://twitter.com/GirlsGoneKyle/status/427666832636403712

GuiA2• 12 years ago

He's a 19 year old making money selling Twitter accounts. I wouldn't spend too much time looking his way for deep life advice and insights.

pbhjpbhj6• 12 years ago

"They are playing by rules that "old media" and most new media do not. To one way of thinking, they are cheating at the media game, and that's why they're winning. (Which they are.)" //

It seems fairly often I hear a comment that so-and-so media company (BBC, local paper, RIAA, ...) are using a private individuals media without permission or attribution.

They're it seems serially copyright infringers. Whilst big-media generally correct it after-the-fact when they're caught it seems worth noting that it's not only "young punks" that are profiting by playing fast-and-loose with media available online.

Yes there's a difference in complexion too: which goes both ways - if the images are historic then arguably [morally] the creators have had time to make them pay. The corollary of course is that unlicensed duplication of new images, particularly those used in the news, is more damaging.

This is not to excuse such tortuous infringement but just to shed more light on the context.

johnwards• 12 years ago

Follow https://twitter.com/PicPedant for lolz, and credits :)

jimmaswell• 12 years ago

If you want the source, you can try Google Reverse Image Search

NamTaf• 12 years ago

I'm not terribly surprised they're run by teens. I've seen them retweet some pretty bad/offensive tweets on both accounts before shortly deleting them (e.g.: misogynistic comments about periods), never mind their cross-promotion and all that. It's as if they mis-judged what they could get away with, because I couldn't work out why someone would want to see a photo of blood-stained pants otherwise.

I briefly followed Earth Pics until they started unrelentingly posting obviously fake photos with no attempt to do research into whether they were real or not. HIP has the same dirty feel to it and so it's no surprised to find out they're related.

They've taken two very possibly interesting topics to run a twitter feed on, and essentially run them in to the ground by not doing even a modicum of work to ensure some sort of integrity behind them. Maybe it's an intentional decision, I don't know, but it just seems like when you're trying to appeal to a semi-academic interest such as geography or history, you'd benefit from doing some fact-checking and verification.

It'd be as if IFLS started posting pseudo-science, for example. In fact, exploring the relative success of both approaches would be a really cool study into new-media or whatever buzzword you want to call it.

The Two Teenagers Who Run the Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics

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