On social media like Reddit, unnecessary censorship is often used as engagement bait. As far as I am aware, comments on the Threadiverse (a broader term than just “Lemmy”) only boosts posts upward in the Active category rather than in the Hot category, so that form of engagement bait uniquely does not really work here. Additionally, bots on Reddit would repost (either from old Reddit posts or directly from the source social medium) screenshots of tweets with the username edited to a different user, sometimes even celebrities, to bypass image recognition filters.

In my mind, it’s always best to cite your source if you can. However, if you can separate the self-focused fluff (if there is any) from the actual content, that would be even better. An example of this is a screenshot of a TikTok with a paragraph of soapbox text located near the content creator’s face; we don’t need the excess focus on the clout-chasing, so cropping the image to just their paragraph (assuming it is an original quote) and citing the creator would be better in that case.

On another sidenote, unlike Reddit, you can edit your posts here to change the image in the post.