w  rd 2 the woss

For many of us, social media is not what it used to be. What was once a place to message friends, and upload personal pictures or videos, has now become a main outlet for media. Facebook is a great example of this. When I first got Facebook in 2010, my newsfeed was wholly filled with posts from friends and family, with the occasional cute cat video. Now, in the year of 2016, rarely does anyone post anything, and it has become a stream of third party videos and pictures, whether that be big-name media companies like UNILAD or Buzzfeed, or smaller entertainment pages.

 

 

From this development in social media culture, there has been a disturbing trend that has been growing: content stealing. Online content stealing occurs when a video or picture is taken, and later posted online onto third party pages with no credits given to the original creator. Now you may ask, why does this even matter? Doesn't this mean that the original creator is simply getting more publicity? Shouldn't they be glad that their videos/pictures are getting viewed and liked?

 

 

The great issue of this situation can really be put into context when we begin to consider the fact that many social media platforms have a monetizing system where creators get paid for their contents. YouTube, Instagram, and now the latest contender, Facebook, have all begun paying their biggest creators for their contents. Facebook recently announced that it is testing a revenue-sharing arrangement with a select number of media companies, where they pay 55% of the revenues from advertisements to the "creators"(BBC 2015).

 

 

It then becomes clear how content stealing can quickly become a very serious issue − Once money begins to be involved in the process, internet theft is no longer a silly game of "Finders Keepers", but rather a financial issue that is blatantly robbing people of actual cash.

A YouTube channel, H3H3 Productions, has recently brought to attention one such thieving Facebook page, called "SoFlo Antonio". With over 7 million followers on Facebook, Soflo's contents possess not a single ounce of originality or integrity as it gains millions of views from other Viners or YouTubers contents. One video many people might be familiar with is of a girl driving while lip-synching to a song. This video was originally uploaded onto her channel, and then later taken by SoFlo and posted onto his Facebook page, garnering millions of views, while her original video gained a meagre fraction of that number. Although SoFlo is a despicable page indeed, it is sickening to think that it is merely one among countless pages benefitting from this system.

 

 

In such a modern age of technology, social media has transformed into a career platform for creators all around the world. It is easy to overlook blatant theft from these platforms, as the concept of linking money to online videos is relatively new, and hard to conceptualize for many. One thing that everyone can do to help prevent this very real form of theft, is to not support these pages or channels that are actively benefitting from the loss of others. We must keep in mind that we control who gets paid, and ultimately, we hold the power to stop this appalling descent in morality social media has been supporting recently.

 

Picture taken from "ROAD RAGE!?! DRIVING WITH LIZZZA" by Liza Koshy - One of the many videos that have circulated various Social Medias with no credit being given to the original creator.