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Gideon Lichfield, editor-in-Chief of MIT Technology Review, recounted a hilarious story of mistaken identity on Twitter this week. According to Lichfield, the publication received an angry email from a man who accused the site of using his portrait without permission to illustrate an article about hipsters who all look the same. The problem? This unnamed complainant wasn’t the man in the image.
The issue began when MIT Technology Review published an article detailing a study called The Hipster Effect: When Anti-Conformists All Look The Same. The article includes a properly licensed header image depicting a prototypical hipster sourced from Getty Images, but the angry email writer didn’t know that, instead believing it was an image of himself.
We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn’t too complimentary about the story, either.)
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
The publication’s Creative Director Eric Mongeon contacted Getty Images to verify the photo’s model release, and that’s when the mystery was solved:
Eric contacted Getty Images. 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.
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
Lichfield’s amusing Twitter story seemingly underscored the study’s premise, but sadly it didn’t include an image of the email writer for comparison.
