How Social Media Bots Steal T-shirt Designs and Sell Them

The robot uprising is here.

At least you’d think so if you were paying attention to the T-shirt designs that pop up on social media.

That’s pretty much what happened to comedian Jesse McLaren, who posted a T-shirt that he designed himself. Shortly after, he started getting ads from other online shops selling that exact T-shirt. Basically, the robots had identified that he had posted a T-shirt, ripped the design (complete with creases on the lettering) and made it into their own T-shirts to sell.

So I posted a picture of myself wearing a shirt that I made- and then immediately had reply tweets featuring my shirt, that I designed, for sale. Like there's an algorithm that just finds Tweets containing shirts, copies the image, and sells it asap. It's ...really impressive? pic.twitter.com/5vGWCsVjZz

— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) November 14, 2020

It’s sort of like those T-shirts generated by the Facebook algorithm. You’ve probably seen them on your own. Things like “Keep Calm, I’m [your name]” or "I love three things: Motorcycles, BBQ and Watching 'Frasier'" or something similarly “customized for you.”

But McLaren’s example is more outright theft than just unnerving invasion of privacy. It's something that affects e-commerce business and designers.

Basically, if you post a tweet and specify that something is a T-shirt design, bots can pick up on it and replicate it onto other selling platforms.

https://twitter.com/robschamberger/status/1201256862068494337

Some people had some fun with the idea to test it.

I got a reply and a tag. I can't believe it worked. pic.twitter.com/Rb1OVVieHO

— NightSkye27 (@NightSkye27) December 3, 2019

To bait the bots and the sites the shirts are posted on, tricky Twitter users started using designs that are often the subject of trademark disputes, like anything related to Disney.

We did it. We achieved something special. Tell your grandchildren that you were THERE when this happened.

Gonna mute this tweet because I'm getting WAY too many notifications, but thank you 🙏 pic.twitter.com/bkStdwOmve

— Nirbion (@Nirbion) December 4, 2019

It worked.

We did it. We achieved something special. Tell your grandchildren that you were THERE when this happened.

Gonna mute this tweet because I'm getting WAY too many notifications, but thank you 🙏 pic.twitter.com/bkStdwOmve

— Nirbion (@Nirbion) December 4, 2019

Big companies like Disney may not go after every single one of these offenders. And, as we saw with Nintendo, some choose their battles carefully. But big companies also have the legal resources to crack down if they want to. For smaller brands or shirt designers without corporate legal teams, this kind of thing could be much more difficult and expensive to deal with.

IP theft or "brand hijacking" is hard enough to prevent when it's real people doing the stealing. Now that there are, apparently, automated processes capable of ripping designs straight from individual users' social media feeds, the internet could become the wild west for intellectual property. We'll see if platforms like Twitter plan to do anything about it. Until then, creators should be careful.