Pirating social media

How do you pirate a social media product though?

Sometimes you face questions that force you to think creatively. How do you pirate a social media product? What does it mean to pirate something and what’s “pirateable” in a social media product?

Online piracy or software piracy is the practice of downloading and distributing copyrighted works digitally without permission, such as music or software.

If we’re talking social media, what part of the whole experience is the pirateable product? Is it the shared content? In that case, pirating is easy: you grab whatever is shared, you take it out of the platform walls and you republish it somewhere else. Let’s pirate something now, shall we?

That right there, is social media content. You’re not consuming it on a social media platform. Meta will never know you saw that post (tweet?), your consumption of that content won’t be registered anywhere. I took it—without permission—and I’m now redistributing it.

Or maybe, the real product of a social media platform is not the content, but the social interactions. And the way you pirate those is by simply not engaging with the platform. By removing yourself from the platform you force the social interaction to happen elsewhere—on your blog, on your personal newsletter, in real life.

It’s a silly problem to think about. Silly, but also fun.