@PicPedant sources the unsourced, and debunks the faked, images of Twitter

 

 

Between Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, and the rest of social media, the ability for a photo to go viral is now greater than ever. But alongside that greater speed comes the fact that images are more than ever likely to un-sourced, mis-sourced, mis-described, and just generally misused—but luckily there are some fighting against that tide, like @PicPedant on Twitter.

Earlier this year, we covered in passing an interview with the two people @HistoryinPics in tracking down the attribution of the thousands of images they shared with their huge volume of followers. @PicPedant is the exact opposite of that, tirelessly finding the original source of images, giving them their correct attribution, fixing descriptions which are either incorrect or just straight up lies, and on frequently pointing out when photos are massively edited from the real things.

The account is run by Paulo Ordoveza, who is doing an incredible job against these legions of crummy Twitter accounts. Some of them aggressively try to remove attribution by cutting out watermarks, and some just scrape descriptions from other Twitter accounts or Reddit to get the images into their feeds. But he has done an incredible job with many of these photos, chasing down the photographer behind them (especially if they're recent), tracking down a link to the archives they appear in they're older, and in the case of manipulations, often even describing the editing going on, and pointing out the original images where parts of it may have come from.

And yet Ordoveza is able to do all of this himself, while these pic specific Twitter feeds aren't willing to do the same due diligence with the content they're posting. If one person can manage to do this so well, why can't any of these massive accounts do the same work on their own content?

.@omgSciencePorn That's a doll from Etsy. http://t.co/u4PGM7l3Wc [repeat from last April] https://t.co/657FQvRqYG

— PicPedant (@PicPedant) February 9, 2014

.@Roopee .@Earth_Pics First thought: infrared filter. And sure enough, Hoya R72: http://t.co/01glhxaJ7Z (Also, Stockholm, Sweden; NOT Japan)

— PicPedant (@PicPedant) February 14, 2014

.@BEAUTIFULPlCS Clouds have been stretched vertically: http://t.co/xNpZ1LmQOo — gets reposted to Reddit all the time: http://t.co/UKQVFWyExC

— PicPedant (@PicPedant) February 16, 2014

(via Metafilter)