Twitter is fighting back against plagiarism in a big way

One small step for Twitter, one big leap for comedians everywhere. Twitter has started cracking down on joke thieves aka those users who copy/paste someone else’s tweet and publish it as their own. If you report a tweet as stolen, Twitter will crack the whip, swooping in and erasing the tweet, replacing the text with “This Tweet from @username has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder.” That’s right, your tweets are copyrighted.

For instance:

You can see that this tweet was originally posted on July 8th, 2015. It was popular, so other users started posting it themselves. But Olga Lexell, the original poster, is a freelance writer, and tweets like this are a big part of her work. So she reported all the copycats, and Twitter took action.

Twitter gives the alleged offenders ten days to respond. If I had to guess, these users probably didn’t have malicious intentions. They likely didn’t even know they were doing anything wrong, which is a side-effect of being so immersed in all this new technology. Everything is happening for the first time, so Twitter is learning as it goes.

And Twitter has definitely had a lot to learn. Recently, they’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism when it comes to dealing with trolls, especially trolls who target women. But a few months ago they started taking steps in the right direction. You also may have seen Kim Kardashian’s recent Twitter suggestion about being able to go in and edit tweets after the fact, to which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey responded “Great idea!” It really is a group effort, and Twitter is the perfect platform for making our voices heard. While we’re at it, could we talk about the weird glitch that’s causing my tweets to not get any faves? Because I know for a fact they are *fire emoji*.

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