When we count a joke, we do not usually investigate who was the original author of it to cite it as if we were doing a doctoral thesis. However, on the Internet things are different. When a meme goes viral, a lot of people do blatant plagiarism to scratch some other like either retweet. Sometimes it goes well and other times it goes quite badly.
play along vs. Plagiarism. The eternal debate on Twitter
The line between repeating a tweet to give strength to a meme or copying it to plagiarize is very fine. For example, the famous ‘we just ran out of dinner’ meme, which first appeared in 2018, worked for repetition. Some poor bastard dropped his roast on the floor as soon as he took it out of the oven and all of Twitter showed solidarity by copying and pasting both the image and the text. We will never know if the original tweet was current or if it was a photo from the Internet, but the trick was to make your followers believe that the same thing had happened to you at such an inopportune moment.
However, there are other users who do not plagiarize as part of a meme, but rather to take credit for a joke they didn’t create. The problem with doing this is that you have to choose the content that is copied. You’ll always get your retweets, but if you pick an over-viewed meme and pass it off as your own, it won’t take long for the Twitter hordes to expose you.
Obi-Wan turns water into wine (again)
Something like this happened yesterday to the user @ alvareto5 on Twitter. «I put up a picture for my aunt in the living room telling her that it is Jesus at the wedding in Cana, she is delighted, she says he is gorgeous.» said the tweet. And he attached the mythical photo of Ewan McGregor playing Obi-Wan Kenobi. Many who did not know about this meme at the time congratulated him on the tweet. However, in a matter of hours, the first vigilantes appeared who began to say that there was nothing original in that publication. In fact, some of those who saw the tweet linked to a post by Insider in which everything that really happened with this meme is explained.
I put up a picture for my aunt in the living room telling her that it is Jesus at the wedding in Cana, she is delighted, she says he is gorgeous. pic.twitter.com/4sl7yNAW0v
– soniaggallardo (@alvareto5) April 20, 2022
The true story It happened more or less like in the tweet of @ alvareto5. In 2018, a young man from Utah gave his parents a painting of Obi-Wan for Christmas. He did it by being inspired by a comment he saw on Reddit about the resemblance between this Star Wars character and Jesus. His parents were quite excited and hung the painting on the wall. Shortly after, this user commented on Reddit that the prank had caught on, although he wasn’t sure how long it would take for his parents to figure it out.
Since then, the tweet has been copied and pasted thousands of times, bringing the prank to new users, but also angering other users who complain it’s not an original tweet. Surely, the first time you and I saw the meme, it was already a plagiarism.
For the record, the photo of Obi-Wan Kenobi is not mine, I got it from the internet. I didn’t know the inside story, I made it up and I thought it was funny. But I thought we were going to see the 4 of us always. It’s been funny going viral though. Here they explain the story https://t.co/RWPZ5ahWGV
– soniaggallardo (@alvareto5) April 20, 2022
