If you use Twitter, you’ve probably seen retweets from an account like @HistoryInPics or @HistoricalPics pop up in your stream. You may not remember which account it was, exactly—there are a bunch of them, and they’re difficult to tell apart. I count 14 Twitter accounts currently using a variant of the @HistoryPics handle: @HistoricalPics, @HistoryInPix, @History_Pics, and so on. Four of the 14 claim to be “THE ORIGINAL,” and most of them reuse each other’s material liberally.
Even discounting the repetition of particular images, there’s a sameness in tone to the tweets that come from these accounts. “History,” as these accounts define it, is a landscape peopled by JFK, the Beatles, Steve Jobs, various movie stars, pretty girls wearing miniskirts, quirky mustachioed bicyclists, and concentration-camp survivors. Even the accounts’ avatars are similar: The classic 1863 Alexander Gardner daguerrotype of Lincoln in a bow tie appears three times. Three other accounts use stylized logos featuring old-timey cameras.
The history-pics accounts are undeniably massive: The most popular, @HistoryInPics, has 1.02 million followers, and the top-five accounts each have more than 300,000. By way of comparison, @Slate currently has around 756,000 followers, and the account I run for Slate’s history blog, @SlateVault, has about 9,000.
In recent weeks, the attribution practices and accuracy of these feeds has become a source of consternation around the Web. Gizmodo blogger Matt Novak published a series of posts pointing out that many of the most-retweeted photos (Nikola Tesla as a swimming instructor; JFK and Marilyn Monroe cuddling) are fakes. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal tracked down the proprietors of the most-followed history pic account, @HistoryInPics, and learned that they aren’t much interested in where their images come from (“around the Internet”) or in providing any kind of attribution. Sarah Werner, digital media strategist at the Folger Shakespeare Library, posted a heartfelt plea to readers of her blog, asking them to leave the historical pictures accounts behind. The post has had its own share of viral success.