- Many classic memes were recently auctioned off
for big bucks by their owners, as NFTs.
- The question of meme ownership
is a difficult one.
- Meet Don Caldwell from Know Your Meme,
a website dedicated
to researching online viral content.
- It's sort of like meme detective work.
- Recently, Don and his team
have been putting their encyclopedic knowledge
of memes to good use, forwarding NFT fraud.
- So here's the original and the fake,
I'll zoom in real tight here.
- So what kind of hard-boiled vigilante tactics
do these meme detectives use?
- No, we actually just use computers.
- Saved onto a blockchain,
NFTs or non fungible tokens
are minted by artists
and then bought and sold online
in curated markets like OpenSea, Foundation
and even at Sotheby's,
NFTs are kind of like
limited edition autographed virtual trading cards
that allow for the tracking and monetizing
of digital art, such as gifs, photos, videos,
music, and yes, even memes.
- The first time I heard about meme NFTs
was when Nyan Cat creator, Chris Torres,
sold Nyan Cat as an NFT for approximately
600,000 US dollars at the time.
And when we saw that
we were just absolutely shocked.
It was such a milestone in internet history.
- This jaw-dropping sale triggered
a meme gold rush.
- All of these old meme stars and celebrities
from years ago started coming out of the woodwork
and started to mint an auction themselves
or their work as NFTs.
- But since an NFT is like a digital certificate
of authenticity, it's provenance is key.
A meme NFT is only valuable
if the creator or the person in the meme
minted it.
This is where Know Your Meme comes in.
Not only do they manage an encyclopedia
of close to 5,000 confirmed memes.
- Here we go again.
- They're the ones who can authenticate
the true owner when it's time for it
to be minted as an NFT.
- Pinpointing the exact origins
of where these phenomenon come from
can be quite challenging.
A difference between traditional detective work,
and what we do
is that we're dealing with online data
that has a lot of metadata associated with it,
and we're able to trace things back
and see how much engagement they've had,
who their original creator is,
who the original poster is a lot of the time,
depending on the platform.
- Reddit, with its archive posts
is easy to search.
Same with Twitter, the ephemeral 4chan,
not so much.
Facebook is notoriously insular
and doesn't play nice with Google,
so the team might use CrowdTangle, TinEye
or their own proprietary dashboard
to SLU on social.
- Tracking down something on YouTube
can be more challenging.
Reverse image search doesn't work with videos,
so you have to sift through lots of episodes
and YouTube uploads, define the exact moment
that is taken for a meme.
Sometimes we'll consult fan communities
that are very familiar with the source material
and ask for their assistance
to discover where these memes come from sometimes.
- Maintaining close relationships
with meme creators and communities
pays off in tips and leads.
That's how the team was alerted
that something was very wrong
with the auction of a meme masterpiece.
- Rage comics are another meme
that comes from this old era of internet history.
They were very popular comic format.
We discovered that there was an NFT of Me Gusta
being auctioned off
on the NFT marketplace foundation.
So there were a number of alarm bells
that went off when we began looking into this
that made this clearly
some sort of shady practice.
The original Me Gusta image
was an illustration done by May.
So here's the original and the fake.
I'll zoom in real tight here.
So here you have all these squiggles
and the lines get really thin
and there's like shading.
And then over here,
everything's pretty much uniform
in terms of darkness, right?
So you can tell that it's been vectorized.
A lot of rage comics are made in MS Paint.
People will use a mouse cursor
to make these faces.
And they're very crude,
usually just black and white.
It loses this kind of level of detail in order
to get this super high res version of it,
that's, you know, line art made of Bezier curve.
So it's kind of got all the telltale signs
of a vector art recreation of a raster image.
So Adobe illustrator has a tool
known as live tracing
that may have been used here.
It takes a raster image and it traces over it
and turns it into a vector image.
Simple lines and curves
that can then be scaled infinitely
to any resolution,
but they also take away details
and they take away shading,
but anyone who's used it before
can tell when something's been vectorized,
versus something that's just been illustrated.
- Apart from this forensic evidence,
another clue was that the poser
used May's dead name.
That's when the Know Your Meme team
reached out to her directly.
- May responded that she was very surprised
to find out that an NFT was being auctioned off
as she had not been the one to auction it off.
- Platforms, such as Foundation,
require that artists being invited
before being allowed to mint their NFTs.
So how did this faker slip through?
- They had dug into her background,
figured out that she had known certain people
and approach them acting as May
in order to get their NFT minted
and auctioned off.
So after we realized
that this was likely an imposter,
we reached out to the marketplace
that the NFT was being auctioned on
and asked them about their vetting process
and how they had determined that this
was owned by the original creator.
And later that day, the auction was removed.
- May Oswald had this piece of advice.
- Be careful with them meme kids,
you know, only get your memes
from trusted sources
- The work of a meme detective is never done
and soon the team would receive
what would become their highest profile case yet.
- So one day we were reached out to,
by this decentralized auction house
known as the Zora.
They were working with the owner of Doge,
Atsuko Satō, who lives in Japan.
We also felt there was this importance
with certifying the authenticity of NFTs
after seeing this Me Gusta fiasco.
So we offered to certify this Doge auction
as authentic after verifying it with Atsuko.
We knew her
and we had even interviewed her ourself prior.
So there were eight photographs of Doge
that were auctioned off on Zora.
One being the most iconic Doge image,
which sold for approximately 4 million US dollars
at the time.
And the case of Doge and Atsuko Satō,
not only was she able to be rewarded
for her contribution to culture,
but she also donated
a significant portion of the auction to charity.
- All in a day's work for Know Your Meme.
So is the Wikipedia viral content
becoming full-time NFT fraud investigators now?
- It's hard to tell exactly
what point in the phase we are,
if this is just a bubble that's bound to pop.
I would wager that it will be around
for some years to come,
as this has provided artists
with a way to be rewarded
for their contributions to culture
in ways they didn't have before.
I envision in the future that historians
and anthropologists will be using
Know Your Meme to figure out what was happening
during this time.
What was their sense of humor?
What did they care about?
In a sense memes are this
kind of lens into the soul of humanity.