"I Want This on a Shirt" Bot Bait

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About

"I Need This On a Shirt" Bot Bait refers to an anti-piracy practice that involves baiting bots which collect popular artworks for online stores into scraping images that warn that these stores profit off stolen art. The practice involves a user posting an image containing a message such as "This site sells stolen artwork," with other users tweeting or commenting that they would like to purchase a shirt containing the image. As a result, the scraped image becomes offered as a design in such online stores. In 2023, Twitter users renewed the T-shirt bot bait campaign, prompting Twitter bots into sharing links to auto-scraped designs that promote humorous or untrue statements, including the untrue claim that J.K. Rowling Killed 2 People In 1993 Drunk Driving Incident.

Origin

On December 1, 2019, Twitter user @robschamberger wrote that replying to artworks posted on Twitter with requests for shirts featuring the image results into bot accounts scrapping the image for online stores that profit off stolen art, and warned users against doing so.^[1] The tweet received over 51,700 retweets and 77,300 likes in four days (shown below).

On December 3rd, 2019, Twitter user @Hannahdoukin tweeted an image reading "This site sells STOLEN artwork, do NOT buy from them!", asking others to reply with requests for the image be turned into a shirt (shown below).^[2] The tweet received over 6,800 retweets and 24,000 likes in two days, with many users complying with the @Hannahdoukin's request.

In the following hours, the design was scrapped by a number of online stores such as Toucan Style, Moteefe, CopThis, Teezyl, Gearbubble, Teechip and others.^[3]

Spread

In the following days, more Twitter users employed the trick to bait online stores into scraping the warning messages, copyrighted imagery and inappropriate art.^[4] For example, A December 4th tweet by @miskiart received over 5,600 retweets and 29,900 likes in two days (shown below, left).
A Tweet by user @robiinya received over 280 retweets and 1,100 likes in two days (shown below, right).^[5]

2023 "Where Can I Get This On A Shirt?" Campaign

In June 2023, various Twitter users began to bait T-shirt bots into generating links to auto-scraped T-shirt designs. On June 10th, 2023, Twitter^[6] user @GarlicCorgi posted a tweet baiting bots into sharing links to a t-shirt that read, "Believe Women Were Killed By Patton Oswalt," gathering over 11,000 likes in two days (seen below, left). Also on June 10th, Twitter^[10] user @boring_as_heck posted a tweet baiting T-shirt bots as well, gathering over 41,000 likes in two days (seen below, right).

On June 8th, 2023, Twitter account Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@TeslaOwnersSV) posted a tweet that read, "Just six months ago, this platform had an insane amount of bots. In a short. Elon musk, and the Twitter team remove them completely. It’s insane to think that this issue was never tackled before," gathering over 400 likes and 2,000 replies. On June 11th, Twitter user @puddingperson posted a reply baiting Twitter t-shirt bots, gathering over 14,000 likes in a day. ^[7] @TeslaOwnersSV deleted their original tweet soon after.

On June 11th, Twitter^[8] user @CriminalUnionFW posted a tweet baiting bots into sharing links to a shirt with Elon Musk's face and text that read, "My dad impregnated my stepsister, who he raised as his own since she was 5 years old, twice and all i got was this stupid t-shirt website." The post gathered over 15,000 likes in a day (seen below, left). On June 11th, Twitter^[9] user @fyridk posted a tweet baiting bots into sharing t-shirts that read, "if you post a link to this shirt you hate FAGGOTS," gathering over 16,000 likes in a day (seen below, right).