On average it takes 1,500 hours to write a book. This is coincidentally the same amount of time that Madonna spends doing bicep curls every month, or indeed the average age of a Justin Bieber fan. But spent alone at a computer, typing sentence after sentence, it’s is an offputtingly long amount of time, and for most of us, it’s much better spent wandering aimlessly through YouTube, pottering around the house, or catching up on all those iTunes Ts and Cs you were meant to read.
But what if you summoned the huge effort to write a book, put it out there, got a bit of good feedback, and then someone copies it word for word, and publishes it in their own name?
This very experience, if we switch back to the world of Twitter, is exactly what has started to happen to us over the last few weeks. With a follower count the size of a small, unremarkable market town in England, @madeupstats has grown much larger than we ever thought it would. And among the thousands of retweets, occasionally the odd person copies a tweet and claims it as their own. They’re normally a Twitter newcomer, and it’s to be expected.
But when @whattheffacts; a colossal 2 million-follower outfit, began to repeatedly copy and paste our stuff, things changed. To kick things off, they copied one of our stats, then hastily deleted it when we spoke up. Then a couple of days ago, they copied another (this time ignoring any protest), and then today, they’ve copied another. Clearly, in one of their editorial meetings, they took the bold, innovative decision that Twitter is much easier when they use other people as unpaid editorial interns. For some reason, they have decided that the retweet, a Twitter feature that is good enough for the rest of us, isn’t worth the hassle.
The real point is, there are a lot of people out there who have decided to have a real go at writing on the internet; Twitter or wherever else they put it. We’ve seen the effort go into developing a good idea for an account, grafted away at it, and follower after follower, they have built up a crowd, all based on their own words, pictures or whatever. It’s hard work, but many do it because they want to see if it can evolve into something bigger, such as a book, column, film or novelty loo roll. For some, such as @dianainheaven, or @shitmydadsays, it works out, and we won’t hide the fact that we’d love to do the same.
So – if you’re still with us, we’d love your support to spread the word about this. We’d like @whattheffacts to simply tweet out an acknowledgement – they could even do a proper RT. On our own, we’re clearly too small for them to worry about, but if you can share this story, maybe they will take notice and play nice. And who knows, they may even follow us…
(Big thanks to @brandondecae, @fleq and @russeldbrown for letting us know about the thing in the first place.)
***Update: Thanks to an overwhelming response to this blog post (special thanks to @thenextweb), @whattheffacts have sent a tweet saying sorry, and reposted the tweets with a credit. Thanks to everyone who weighed in and helped.***
Excellent article – I think that’s merely the digital manifestation of the problem of joke theft in Comedy, compounded by the ease of copying and pasting, but mitigated by the fact the theft is far more visible.
Sadly, it’s worsened by the fact that, unlike the stand-up community, that has an amount of self-regulation on theft because it’s just a big no-no and will get you shunned, the audience of twitter quips is less savvy about this.
We’ve had the same problem with a friend on a trivia website, getting info poached by a much much larger, but newer site (they were just better at marketing their shit) an it’s even more frustrating when there was significant editorial effort in sourcing, cross-checking and editing the trivia (not that jokes are easy though).
Not sure what can be done, though – a campaign so madeupstats followers tweet followers of whateffacts and tell them about it ? would have to find a way to coordinate, otherwise the top of their follower list would get spammed and the rest would not know. Maybe something along the lines of “tweet the people whose handle start with the same letter as yours” ?
Keep up the good work!
W.
Impressed by @Madeupstats approach to this. Does raise some important questions about Twitter and intellectual property.
In this instance I’m not talking about protracted IP legal battles etc., but the issue of attribution, raised in the article above. Easy to resolve with some common sense – Give an ‘RT’, ‘MT’ or ‘Via’.
Get somebody to help you prepare a nice pro-forma DMCA takedown notice for plagiarisation of any of your tweets they have copied and send it to Twitter. Twitter will then delete the tweet for you.
Personally speaking, if I use a joke that isn’t mine I credit using via. It’s only polite. Stealing someone elses stuff is not for me ta.
Are their stats supposed to be made up? Looking at the last 20 or so, I’m not sure what they’re trying to do. If they’re made up they should be funny. If they’re true then WTF are they doing stealing from you guys?
With a little technical expertise you could create a twitterbot to send a message to everyone who mentions @whattheffacts in a tweet. That’s kind of a nuclear option though.
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Thanks for the mention. I don’t follow @whattheffacts but my friend retweeted it and I was like, what the f!? I’m not having that!
Keep up the good work
This is terrible, I am no writer, but have a friend writer. Thank you for sharing it and yes I am re-twitting your post, love the feature and used it.. It’s a click away.
Good on you for bringing it up. I follow WTFFacts and its gone from being ‘facts’ to anything – I have no idea what they’re trying to be. The whole point of a WTF fact is that they’re true and not MadeUpStats.
I’ve stopped following a few very high profile comedy accounts who have been outed for tweet theft from tiddlers. Twitter has certainly made such low blow behaviour much more conspicuous.
Keep up the good work – MadeUpSaturday has been most entertaining.
I see they’ve now apologised in less than 140 characters saying the two posts were sent to them by ‘contributors’ – but doesn’t explain why they acted on your first complaint and ignored the next two.
You make some really important points in this Post about plagirism. Good on you.
Really…. get a life people. Leave what ever dark hole you live in and get some sun.
its freakin twitter! lol its not that serious! people copy tweets every day without giving due credit. its not that serious
There are so many problems in the world and you’re worried about someone stealing your tweets? Yep, this is where mankind is now at.
Really. Its just twitter. Calm down…
Very, very nice page!
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