The line between growing one’s virtual brand off the material other people have produced and affiliating with a known brand to push each other’s material simultaneously is how consent is used in honoring and appropriately crediting the source of one’s material or the willful failure to do so.

For Instagram skit platforms, the hierarchy encompasses the people who create their own original content, others who infuse their ideas into already created materials and those who simply add any of these ready-made content on their platform in a bid to ‘promote’ them. A category popular Instagram influencer Tunde Ednut easily falls under.

Known for stoking up several controversial conversations, getting in virtual brawls, facilitating giveaways and raking in immense advertisement deals, his latest jab at singer Speed Darlington who has resurfaced recently with the branding of a social media comic act, claiming to have brought him to limelight might be infuriating on the surface -which is justified-  and untrue considering Speed has been around for a while. What Tunde’s jabs spotlight, however, is his unhealthy pattern of redistributing other people’s content without consent, with the idea that these benefit the owners of these content in some way, whether they want to or not.

The sad thing is that this is not exclusive to Tunde Ednut, whose Instagram contents have garnered him more than one million followers, but other entertainment/comic centered platforms that freely grow their brands by simply putting up other people’s contents. With the number of people behind Speed Darlington, including beauty entrepreneur and Influencer Bobrisky, we might be witnessing the beginning of a more scrutinized content curational process amongst social media influencers.

And we can’t wait to see how it plays out.

Nelson C.J

Nelson C.J is a culture writer with works in The New York Times, Xtra Magazine, OkayAfrica, Black Youth Project, AfroPunk, and a few other spaces. You can find him saving dog pictures on Twitter.