Social media giant Facebook allowed stolen or recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having regulations prohibiting the act. According to the internal memos by Facebook’s researchers, about 40 percent of Facebook page traffic in 2018 went to sites where content had been stolen or reused, The Wall Street Journal reported as part of its ‘Facebook Files’ series that offers a look inside the social-media giant’s failings.

While individual users put content as personal profiles on the social media platform, Facebook pages are used by companies and organisations to disseminate content.

Researchers also said Facebook was slow to act on copyright violations, fearing legal action.

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The easiest way to make a big Facebook Page was to find an existing, engaged community, scrape the content popular there and repost it on your page, said a 2018 research report by senior data scientist of Facebook Jeff Allen that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“This is the basic game plan used by many bad actors,” Allen wrote before quitting the organisation in 2019. He called this intentional distribution of unoriginal content “manufactured virality.”

According to this year’s company data, posting unoriginal content continues to be a formula to success on Facebook.

The strategy helped build a large audience on Facebook and was used by American and foreign groups that peddle false information and post divisive content on social media, company researchers said.

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However, the prevalence of plagiarised content makes it difficult for the company’s legitimate content partners such as news outlets to get visibility on the platform, the documents revealed.

Allen claimed Alphabet’s YouTube was more aggressive in policing copyright infringements on its platform than Facebook.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the social media giant had taken steps to remove fake accounts and reduce distribution of unoriginal news.

“These working documents from years ago show our efforts to understand these issues and don’t reflect the product and policy solutions we’ve implemented since,” Stone said.

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Facebook limits the distribution of unoriginal content, although it does not remove it, Stone said.

Meanwhile, in the second quarter this year, the company released a list of 20 best performing posts, of which 15 were duplicated from either Facebook pages or other social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Only four posts had original content, while one was deleted.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Nov 10, 2021 8:26 PM IST