Four different problems get filed under “someone copied me”, and they have different remedies. Working out which one you have is most of the job, because using the wrong process is the commonest reason a report goes nowhere.
- Your actual content, reuploaded elsewhere.
- Your format or idea, copied, usually not actionable.
- An account using your name or photograph to pose as you.
- An AI replica of your face or voice, which is where the law moved this year.
Your content, reuploaded#
The most straightforward case. You own the copyright in what you made, and platforms have a dedicated process for it that carries legal weight.
Use the copyright form, not the general report button. They go to different teams. A general “this is spam” report gets triaged by moderation; a copyright complaint goes to a legal process the platform is obliged to operate.
What a takedown notice needs to contain, in substance, regardless of which country you are in, platforms run the same process globally because they operate under the US regime:
- Identification of the work you own, with a link to your original.
- Identification of the infringing material, with a direct link to the exact video or post, not the account.
- Your contact details.
- A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised.
- A statement that the information is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them, made under penalty of perjury.
- Your signature, electronic is fine.
The platform forms walk you through all of this. What they cannot do for you is the evidence, so:
Keep a record from the first incident. A simple spreadsheet with the date found, the URL of the copy, the URL of your original, the upload date of each, and a screenshot. This sounds excessive until the third occurrence, at which point it is the difference between a report and a pattern you can demonstrate.
If it is happening at volume, apply for the platform’s rights-management tooling. Meta has been expanding its content protection tools during 2026, including impersonation detection with an easier reporting route.
What not to do: post publicly accusing the account before you have filed. It occasionally works and it more often turns a clean takedown into a dispute, and an audience piling onto someone can breach platform rules on your side. File first. Talk about it afterwards, if at all.
Your format, copied#
Copyright protects the expression, not the idea. A channel that copies your structure, your subject, your editing rhythm and your thumbnail style while making its own videos is usually not infringing anything, however maddening it is to watch.
Where there may be something: your name or logo, if you have trademark rights in it. A copied thumbnail image, which is your artwork. Copied script text, which is your writing. The concept itself, no.
The honest advice is that pursuing format copying rarely pays and often costs more attention than it returns. The competitive answer is to be the version people search for by name, which is also, as it happens, the only search behaviour that still reliably produces a click in 2026. Getting found covers why.
An account posing as you#
Every platform has an impersonation report, separate from copyright. These generally resolve faster than people expect, because platforms have clear policies and no interest in hosting fake accounts.
Report it yourself. Do not ask your audience to mass-report, which can be treated as coordinated behaviour and occasionally rebounds on the person who asked.
Provide identification if requested. It speeds things up considerably and the request is routine.
Say if money is involved. An account using your name to run a fake giveaway, sell a product, or message your followers asking for payment is fraud, and fraud escalates through a faster queue than impersonation on its own. Say the word in the report.
The damage from impersonation usually lands on your audience rather than on you, which is why the useful work is preventative:
- Get verified wherever it is available to you. Meta’s professional plans, launched in 2026 at $14.99 and $49.99 a month, include verification and impersonation protection, which may be worth it if this is a recurring problem.
- Tell your audience, in a pinned post, exactly which accounts are yours.
- Tell them what you will never do, never message first asking for money, never run a giveaway requiring a payment, never ask for a wallet address. Scams work because people do not know what is out of character.
An AI replica of your face or voice#
This is the category that shifted during 2026, and there is more to work with than there was a year ago.
Denmark amended its copyright law to give every person an exclusive right over AI-generated reproductions of their face, voice and other identifiable personal characteristics. The right arises automatically, without registration, applies to everyone rather than only public figures, and carries takedown rights, civil enforcement and platform accountability. It is among the first laws anywhere to treat likeness this way.
The United States has the NO FAKES Act, addressing voice and visual likeness in digital replicas. The rights are exclusive, transferable, and survive death with renewal for up to seventy years.
The EU AI Act’s transparency obligations, in force since 2 August 2026, require deepfakes to be labelled and AI-generated content to carry machine-readable marks. That is not a personal right you can enforce yourself, but it makes unlabelled synthetic content a compliance problem for whoever published it, which gives you something to point at when you complain.
In practice: report it to the platform under impersonation, and under synthetic media specifically where that option exists. Preserve evidence, including the original of whatever was used to make it, because provenance is what you will be asked for. If it is commercial, a replica of you selling something, that is the version most likely to justify legal advice, since someone is making money from your likeness and there is a quantifiable loss.
Where you will get the most protection depends heavily on where you and the publisher are based, and that is a solicitor’s question rather than ours.
Sources: Schjødt on the Danish reform, Dennemeyer, European Commission.
The replicas you authorised without noticing#
Worth separating out, because the ones causing creators the most trouble are frequently not theft at all.
Brand contracts increasingly include the right to use your likeness in AI-generated material, a synthetic version of you appearing in advertising you never filmed, sometimes in perpetuity, for a single flat fee. Once granted, that is not impersonation. It is a licence you agreed to, and no takedown process will help.
Read anything mentioning digital replica, synthetic media, AI-generated derivative works, training data or perpetual likeness rights, and treat it as a separate licence with its own fee and term. Contract clauses that cost you money has the language to look for and something you can send back.
Losing your own account#
The same category of loss and by far the most likely to happen to you.
Two-factor authentication on everything, using an app rather than SMS where the option exists. Recovery email and phone kept current, most permanent account losses are people who could not receive a code at an address they stopped using in 2021. A record of your account details, creation date and payment method, since recovery flows ask for exactly that.
And keep your own copies of everything you have published. A channel removal takes the archive with it, and there is no version of the recovery process that gives you your files back.
The thing that actually saves you is a route to your audience that does not depend on any account. An email list is the only asset that survives a suspension, and the people who wish they had one are almost always people who have just lost something else.
What we cannot do#
We have no route into any platform. We cannot escalate a report, restore an account, or persuade anyone to look at your case, and we cannot advise on your legal position. Nobody outside the platform can, whatever they charge for it, which is itself worth knowing, because “account recovery services” are a scam category that targets exactly the people reading this page.
What is above is a description of the mechanisms that exist and how to use them properly.
General information, not legal advice, and the law in this area is changing quickly.