Twitter’s New Rule Could Mean A Lot Of Accounts Will Be In Big Trouble

You might think robbing someone else's joke is an annoying but relatively innocent offense... but not according to Twitter. The social media site is now reportedly clamping down on anyone who plagiarises jokes by deleting the offending tweets and maybe even blocking the users account. A Twitter account, Plagiarism is Bad, reported this weekend that a number of tweets telling the same joke had been deleted on request of the "copyright holder". Image via Twitter. The joke in question (that's it at the end) belongs to Olga Lexell, a freelance writer from Los Angeles who told The Verge: "I simply explained to Twitter that as a freelance writer I make my living writing jokes (and I use some of my tweets to test out jokes in my other writing). "I then explained that as such, the jokes are my intellectual property, and that the users in question did not have my permission to repost them without giving me credit." It turns out that stealing or copying tweets is actually against Twitter's terms of service, and doing so can result in an account being blocked. Is anyone else thinking about this classic Friends episode when Ross accuses Chandler of stealing his Dr. Monkey joke?