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Why picspam and repost accounts are bad

by nev

You've seen them on Twitter, you're seeing them on the fediverse: accounts with names like "AmazingNature8" or "HistoryPix", or occasionally human-sounding names like "Massimo" and "Veronique". Popular topics include nature and wildlife photos, historic images, relatable memes, fine art, and so on.

They repost photos or memes that have gone viral elsewhere, like Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit. The text of the post is scraped as well; google a distinctive sentence and you'll turn up a previous post. Credit, if it's ever given, is a handle with no URL or indication of what social network it belongs to. Tellingly, on the fediverse, there are virtually never image descriptions.

I loathe these accounts. They are the pink slime of the Internet.

Since I end up having to give this spiel every time I raise the alarm about such accounts, I'm putting it down here in a more permanent place.

Creators deserve credit

Look, I'm not trying to be the copyright police. I don't expect everyone to source every single image they post. But creating memorable images, particularly wildlife and nature photos, takes considerable expertise, hard work, and resources. An actual human being not only mastered photography and acquired (or even made) valuable equipment, learned where and when to go, lugged everything out, and patiently waited in perfect stillness for an animal to come into frame to get exactly the right shot. (To say nothing of processing and editing afterwards!) You're not just looking at a single instant—you're seeing years of work.

They make money—I don't say "a living", because it's really fucking hard to earn a living this way—from people buying prints, or media outlets buying licensing rights. If you want the awesome pictures to keep coming, you need to actually support the people who make them, and that means giving them credit. Link the web page the media originally appeared on, or at least the creator's handle or their website.

When you find the original source or creator, you also often get vital context like when and where the photo was taken, how they got the photo, and what gear or techniques they used. Photographers are quite happy to share these details, but they're typically omitted from reposts.

There are also people who make high-quality Creative Commons-licensed or public domain content, so anyone can use their images for free with fewer (or no) strings attached. I think this is awesome and we need to encourage more people to do it! But for that to happen, we need to preferentially share and promote that content instead of stolen stuff.

Picspam can easily spread misinformation and showcase unsafe or unethical treatment of wildlife

Many viral animal photos are…not what they seem to be. This includes:

  • staged photos with animals in forced, contorted poses, or coaxed into unnatural environments or behaviours
  • staged photos with captive animals presented as if they were wild
  • photos taken in protected or restricted areas where people are definitely not supposed to be
  • exotic animals or local wildlife, like raccoons or big wild cats, irresponsibly being kept as pets, being fed, or otherwise inappropriately habituated to humans

There are some animals that it's very hard to get ethical photos of at all, and most photos circulating online will be of abused captive animals. (Elephants come to mind.) Even some responsibly kept captive-bred animals are descended from ones that had to be smuggled out of their own country, fuelling demand in the pet trade and incentivizing people to take more animals from the wild. (It's often quicker and easier to capture and ship an animal than to breed new ones. This can have an outsized effect on species that reproduce slowly, have low populations, and/or are only found in small areas.)

Without source and context, it's impossible to warn a well-meaning person that they're doing something ill-advised, to hold people who deliberately abuse animals accountable, or to learn that the creator has disavowed a practice. For all you know, the original video is on YouTube with a description reading "UPDATE: NEVER DO THIS!!!" But media stripped of source and context can't be taken down, annotated, updated, or explained.

Presenting media context-free as "cute" or "cool" can amplify and normalize bad practices. It can put people, animals, and the environment in danger.

(It doesn't always—but, from a mod/admin perspective, you must always anticipate and pre-empt the worst-case scenarios. Besides, there are only so many photos of, like, foxes or whatever. That "CuteWildAnimalEveryHour" account, statistically speaking, will include a certain percentage of inappropriate or irresponsible stuff.)

More innocuously, scraped descriptions are often wrong about the geographic location, the species of the animal, and what's going on in the photo. It may seem minor, but once a photo gets sucked into the homogenizing vortex of context-free reposting, the misinformation floods search results and makes actual information harder to find.

Viral repost accounts can be hijacked for scams, propaganda, etc.

If you're a scammer trying to get people to click on your sketchy link, or you're a state agency trying to spread propaganda and misinformation, you don't want to start from the bottom—you want an account with a lot of followers and an established footprint, one that won't be caught by anti-spam tools that flag new accounts with no history. And viral reposts are a really quick way to build up that cred.

Sometimes a big account gets hacked; or the owner sells it; or it was the owner's intention from the beginning. They add a store link to their bio, or are suddenly promoting €L0N¢o1n, or they start to sprinkle more blatant misinformation in with their political outrage-bait, or extremist dog-whistles in with their artwork and architecture.

In my opinion, the best way to prevent this is to shut down the clout factories before they start.

Humans > robots

Personally, I like seeing the rich texture of people's lives beyond their published work. I like knowing that the lady who took that stunning hummingbird photo also works at her tiny local newspaper, and the guy who took that ant photo lives in Texas and is hopping mad about how the right wing is decimating higher education, and that the person who set up that hedgehog live cam also has an OnlyFans and is a brilliantly funny troller of techbros. I like being able to throw a couple bucks to a talented artist who needs to make rent. It reassures me when someone occasionally takes a break from ranting about politics to chronicle their travel misadventures or post a picture of their lunch. Because I'm not just here for "content". I'm here for people. I know that not everyone agrees with me. But if you do, I firmly believe that cracking down on picspammers is one small part of creating the Internet we want.

Further resources

Tags: FediAdmin