The Most Popular Posts On Facebook Are Plagiarized

In Facebook's "widely viewed content report" released last week, The Verge's Casey Newton noticed something arguably just as damning as the spread of COVID-19 misinformation or rise of vaccine hesitancy: almost all of the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter were effectively plagiarized from elsewhere. From the report: Facebook's report details the top 20 most widely viewed posts on the network over the past three months. One of the posts was deleted before Facebook published it. Of the remaining 19, though, only four appear to have been original. The remaining 15 had been published in at least one other place first, and were then re-uploaded to Facebook, sometimes with small changes. [...] Facebook has long been home to reappropriated content, from the freebooting scandal during 2017's pivot to video to the more recent phenomenon of Instagram's Reels being flooded with videos bearing TikTok watermarks. But this kind of dumb, cheap growth hacking should sound familiar to anyone who paid even passing attention to the 2016 election. Russia's infamous Internet Research Agency commissioned a troll army to build up big followings on innocuous-seeming Facebook pages using a wide variety of engagement bait, then gradually shifted those pages to begin sharing more divisive political memes. That's all much harder to do now, thanks to a variety of measures Facebook has taken to make it more difficult for people to disguise their identities or countries of origin. The company now routinely removes networks of pages where the creators' identities are suspect. And it's worth saying that in the most recent election, inauthentic behavior of the 2016 variety did not play a significant role. Most importantly, Facebook now has a policy against "abusive audience building" -- switching topics and repeatedly changing a page's name for the purpose of growing a following. But it seems notable that for domestic actors, the tactics not only work, but remain the most effective way to reach a large audience five years later. Steal some questions that went viral somewhere else, spam them on your page, and presto: you're one of the most-viewed links for the entire quarter on the world's biggest social network. "The plagiarists who dominate Facebook's top 20 links are likely doing it primarily for clout and ill-gotten audience growth," Casey goes on to say. "But some of the other characters here appear to have more direct monetary incentives..."

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