Sourcing on Twitter

There are people on Twitter like Daniel Drezner, Vali Nasr, and Stephen Walt, who scrupulously provide the links to the sources of the images, text, tweets and the like that they use. This is obviously convenient when I want to know more, which is often the case with tweets by these and some other people with whom I have no personal contact. Then there are those who don’t. I can usually figure out the source anyway from the information available from the texts and images, but it can be quite a nuisance sometimes when I really want to know and I have only purely visual information to go by.

Here’s the thing: Is taking images from the internet and tweeting it without attribution really within the boundaries of fair use of copyright? Twitter actually encourages this by forcing us to upload images from our devices by making it impossible (at least within my limited internet skills) to embed an image (or video either FWIW) directly from an outside source. My guess is that this helps keep viewers from wandering off to other websites.

I’m not so scrupulous that I’m going to make a big issue out of this, but I’m flagging it here because I am somewhat inconvenienced by the practice.