Josh Ostrovsky aka “The Fat Jew” is all over the headlines this week, and timing couldn’t be better, following our article on the controversial practice of “freebooting” earlier this month for our Members Club subscribers.
The big story is that (we’ll refer to him as) Josh was able to secure all kinds of celebrity and income due to the popularity/virality of his content, and now he’s been called out for “stealing” (nearly 100% of) that very content from other social media personalities and then reposting it, most often without credit (freebooting).
Unfortunately, Josh is hardly alone in doing this, and among the more vigorous social media “influencers”, freebooting of this sort is not a rare phenomenon.
Any casual click on a trending hashtag (such as, ironically, #thefatjew) at any time can reveal countless instances of freebooting, and entire networks of users on every social platform have adopted the practice, sometimes even creating mechanisms by which users eager for more reach can pay for a shout-out across associated freebooting accounts.
On Instagram, you may see the same images posted a thousand times, sometimes with credit and sometimes without. However, with each generation of reposting, it becomes more difficult to identify the original publisher, thanks to Instagram’s filters and the (likely temporary) lack of sophisticated image-recognition software that can see past them.
The frequency of freebooting depends largely on the platform.
Facebook and Twitter enable users to share content from its original publisher, while allowing the reposter to retain an amount of “virality” from the shared content.
A repost on Facebook still gives “likes” and comments to the reposter, though the actual content remains tied to the original publisher.
Twitter allows those who “retweet” to push the shared content to their followers and their own timelines, and the original publisher remains in the shared tweet.
On Instagram, however, sharing is a bit more complicated.
There are many apps that facilitate “reposting”, often adding an overlay with the original publisher’s username, in addition to including a “mention” of the original publisher in the “comment” that accompanies the repost. But there is no inherent function in Instagram (as in Facebook and Twitter) to allow users to effectively “repost”.
This leaves users with the sole option to repost a screenshot of the original content, and it’s at the reposter’s discretion whether to credit the original publishing account.
Of course, Instagram’s omission of a workable “repost” function should not legitimize what is essentially plagiarism by reposting without credit, but this has largely been the case.
Instagram users are able to report copyright and trademark violations (through a somewhat lengthy process), but with a viral meme, quote, or video, the freebooting can happen so fast that the original publisher would find it nearly impossible to report all of the unauthorized activity.
And with each unauthorized repost being a “stand-alone” piece of content on Instagram as opposed to Twitter and Facebook’s sharing structure (all rooted to the original post), there’s no top-down solution to pursue.
If, in the future, Instagram adds a native “repost” function, it will be harder for social media users to justify the controversial practice, with or without attribution.
Back to Josh: Whether you consider him a joke plagiarist or an effective social media curator (or if you’ve never even heard of him), this controversy is worth noting and, as we discussed, there are serious implications for social media users and account managers.
A glance at any of Josh’s social media accounts today shows posts with clear attributions of credit to the original source (although that “original” source may also be a freebooter), and it’s likely that the entire controversy has lent more to Josh’s celebrity than any of his previous efforts.
In any case, the warning is clear: Freebooting is plagiarizing, and content creators (as well as the social networks where they publish) are taking it seriously.
Our Members Club subscribers have been aware of this issue before it was in headlines, having been covered in this month’s Essential Insights. Our subscribers are also able to avoid many of these issues with our Inspiration Station (part of the Members Club subscription), as they are fully licensed to all of our creative content for posting on any number of social media outlets.
To learn more about our Members Club, click here.
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