Twitter Users Are Brilliantly Taking Revenge on Bots That Steal Artwork

Battling the ‘I’d love to have this on a shirt!’ bots

If you’re new to the deep, dark underworld of bots who steal art on Twitter, let me quickly catch you up.

A while ago, someone (or many someones) noticed that when creators posted art on Twitter for their followers to enjoy, lots of people would reply to the tweet saying something like, “Hey, I’d love to have this on a shirt!”

And because humans are smart and many of them are also sneaky and unprincipled when it comes to stealing other people’s creative work, it wasn’t long before people started building Twitter bots that would find all of those “Hey, I’d love to have this on a shirt!” comments and slurp up the associated artwork so they could pirate it, without crediting the original creator, and then automatically create those shirts and sell them.

If you’re an artist or a supporter of artists, you can see how this is not only annoying, rude, and often illegal, but it’s also harmful to an artist’s livelihood, especially if those folks sell their own merchandise themselves.

Aaron Reynolds (@Effinbirds on Twitter) spends a solid chunk of his time issuing DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices to places like Teespring Support, begging them to please stop bootlegging his work, but it’s an uphill battle. Outside of taking legal action or repeatedly asking their followers not to buy from those sites, there’s not that much else creators can do.

But the great thing about algorithms like these? They’re not that smart. They’re not that reactive. And they can easily be hijacked — not for evil, but for good.

How Twitter users are hacking bootleg bots

This is where Twitter user and artist @Hannahdouken comes in. On December 3, they made a simple request of Twitter: Retweet a piece of original artwork with a phrase like, “I want this on a shirt.” The art itself as a Trojan horse of sorts, bearing the words, “This site sells stolen artwork, do NOT buy from them!”