Trump debates Trump by Justin T Brown

Yet another video is about to make the rounds without crediting the original creator. The maker in this case is Justin T Brown, who has made an edit of the Axios interview with Trump, to make it appear as if Trump is interviewing – or debating – himself. The result is hilarious:

Hundreds upon thousands of accounts will likely download this video from different locations and share it either as their own content or pretend to not know where they found it. If they uploaded it to their own account, you have to ask “Well, where did you get it in the first place?” Why isn’t even that source credited? There is always a source.

I was alerted to this video by my partner in crime James Royal-Lawson and when I raised the issue of the lack of creator credit we went on a quick detective hunt. It didn’t take more than minutes as others had done the work before us. Cody Johnston had already found the YouTube channel, but even then we couldn’t be sure. A YouTube channel with only 7 followers (it has more now) and two videos: one making fun of Biden and the other making fun of Trump. There were still doubts as to the authenticity of this as the source.

I did a search for “Justin T Brown” on Twitter and noticed that most mentions of that name were crediting him as the creator of this video. This is how I found that Austin Tolin had done his due diligence and located Justin’s Instagram account.

And the latest post on this instagram account was of course the video. A further step allowed us to feel even more confident in Justin’s competence. A click on his profile link brings us to his website: justinbrownpost.com. As it turn out, Justin Brown actually appears to work with video production.

If you don’t know who made it, share where you found it

Please do not share content without crediting creators. If you have to(?) share without knowing, at least disclose where you got the content! in this case it was The Lincoln Project who started sharing the video without credit but instead asking the innocent(?) question “Who made this?” That’s not good enough. The immediate question back should be “Where did you get it?” Also, finding sources usually takes less than five minutes using a search engine on one or several social media platforms.

People make stuff, sometimes it gets popular and sometimes not. But freeriding on other people’s content without even a nod in their direction is not a good look. We can probably all do better.

An hour ago Justin himself added this comment to his YouTube video:

Ummm… I just realized this kind of popped-off. Unexpected, but appreciated – thank you. More importantly -> fuck this guy, Black Lives Matter, COVID is the appetizer to Climate Change, get involved in your communities, grow a garden, justice is what love looks like in public, and solidarity forever.

You can also view the original Axios interview (on YouTube), with interviewer Jonathan Swan.