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Stolen memes? What an odd concept.

Normal people would retweet someone's content or quote it, unless they want to change it in some way that requires posting it as their own. Or moving it to a media where it can't be directly shared with attribution.

That's what normal people do. This is, in fact, why when Musk posts a meme, that tweet gets thousand of retweets. Ever thought about how if "stolen meme" was an odd concept, then the retweet count would be 0?

It's an odd concept by just the traditional definition of the term; being copied and redistributed (regardless of attribution) en mass is just the way that memes propagate to begin with.

Zooming in on both the twitter use case, and how most users of those platforms see meme ~= funny image or OC, a stolen meme is more akin to stealing a joke.

So "stolen memes" is a phrase that makes zero sense for the broader definition of the word meme, but makes complete sense for the more specific definition.

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