If you use Twitter, you have probably seen one of the dozens of feeds that post photos without giving proper credit to the original photographer. Some accounts, like @HistoryInPics and @Earthpix, have millions of followers who retweet and share the uncredited images thousands of times. Those accounts recently sparked debate after the teenagers who manage them were interviewed by Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic. While not crediting the photographers is bad enough, sometimes these accounts post historical photos with inaccurate captions, bad science, or images that are photoshopped and passed off as unaltered.
But as the number of accounts sharing uncredited photos grows, so does the backlash. A few Twitter accounts are dedicated to exposing the truth about the images. One of them is run by Paulo Ordoveza, a local who posts as @PicPedant. Ordoveza started his account just five days ago, and already has over 1,300 followers. He responds to tweets from the offending accounts, providing the photographer’s name or the correct scientific or historical information. Ordoveza’s work caught our attention, so we asked him a few questions about his uphill battle exposing uncredited or false images.
