This is the funniest thread on Twitter right now!

A man threatened to sue a technology magazine for using his image in a story about why all hipsters look the same.

The story in the MIT Technology Review detailed a study about the so-called hipster effect — “the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same.”

Here is a Twitter thread on how that went. It cracked me up.

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A few days ago we ran a piece in @techreview about some research purporting to explain the “hipster effect”—the fact that nonconformists often end up nonconforming in the same way. We used a stock Getty photo of a hipster-ish-looking man. https://t.co/8LB6qLSmgS

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn’t too complimentary about the story, either.)

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

Now, as far as I know, calling someone a hipster isn’t slander, no matter how much they may hate it. Still, we would never use a picture without the proper license or model release. So we checked the license. https://t.co/uFPXXNlEid

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

The image does have restrictions—e.g., if you use it “in connection with a subject that would be unflattering or unduly controversial to a reasonable person (for example, sexually transmitted diseases)”, you should say that the person in it is a model. https://t.co/sYNmqJYZ2g

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

But Eric Mongeon, @techreview‘s fearless creative director, said, “Over my dead body are we taking down a perfectly good image because some dude doesn’t like being called a hipster.” Or words to that effect.

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

But Eric Mongeon, @techreview‘s fearless creative director, said, “Over my dead body are we taking down a perfectly good image because some dude doesn’t like being called a hipster.” Or words to that effect.

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

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Eric contacted Getty Images. Getty looked in their archive for the model release. And came back to us with the surprising news: the model’s name wasn’t the name of our angry hipster-hater.

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019

In other words, the guy who’d threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn’t the one in the photo. He’d misidentified himself.

All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other. /ENDS

— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019