Man sued over pic of him in article about hipsters looking alike – it wasn’t him
A man threatened to sue a magazine for using his picture in an article saying all hipsters look alike – only to discover the image was of someone else.
The website MIT Technology Review had run a piece by a mathematician about the so-called ‘hipster effect.’
It went on to explain why ‘anti-conformists always end up looking the same’ and was illustrated using a picture of a man sporting a checked shirt, beard and a beanie.
One furious reader contacted the team claiming to be the man in the picture and said he would sue.
The fashion follower declared: ‘Your lack of basic journalistic ethics in both the manner in which you “reported” this uncredited nonsense, and the slanderous, unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response, and I am, of course, pursuing legal action.’
However, it appears the hipster only went to serve the point that they do indeed look alike.
Editor of MIT, Gideon Lichfield, looked into the complaint and discovered the complainant wasn’t the man pictured.
The image used in the academic article was of a model who had posed for picture agency Getty and who had given his permission for the shot to be used.
Gideon explained: ‘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.
‘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.’
Gideon said that after a round of emails, they wrote to the man and said ‘we don’t believe this is you’ to which he responded ‘Oh I guess you’re right, it’s not.’
Gideon revealed he didn’t get an apology but was ‘happy’ it had been resolved.
The article was written by mathematician at Brandeis University, Jonathan Touboul on ‘the hipster effect.’
He found that hipsters initially act differently but then undergo a phased transition into a ‘synchronized state’.
This article was originally published on March 9, 2019
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