Does anyone else remember when
people used to use Facebook to post actual statuses or share interesting
things? For the most part, besides a few
dedicated consistent posters, my Facebook feed consists of funny or
entertaining YouTube videos or Vines that people share from various pages that
they like. Now this doesn’t really sound
bad at first, but when you consider that many of these videos are being shared
from ever-more-popular content aggregation pages that basically steal and
re-upload them directly to Facebook without giving any credit, you can see where
the problem lies. A YouTube channel that
I follow called Kurzgesagt
(or “In a Nutshell”) recently posted a video describing this issue,
and it seems that the problem actually lies mostly on Facebook’s end.
Facebook’s
goal is to compete with these other video sites, so obviously they build their
site to favor videos that are shared through their own services, rather than
external ones like YouTube or Vine; the way they go about doing this, however,
is where their actions become questionable.
They have actually rigged their system so that videos hosted on Facebook
have higher priority to be displayed to the end user over videos from other
sites. This causes a problem because
that means that these pages that steal videos get higher exposure than the links/embeds
for the actual source videos. Now this wouldn’t
exactly be a problem if Facebook were as diligent as YouTube is about tracking
and removing stolen content, but so far they seem to be perfectly content with
the situation because it’s getting them more total video views. There are ways to flag videos for copyright
violations, but Facebook makes this much harder to do than its competitors (I
wonder why…). Basically, the end result
of this is that the original content creators get completely screwed over,
while both Facebook and those who steal the videos profit off of their stolen
work. As if that weren’t bad enough, in
addition to looking the other way in terms of stolen content, they also
artificially boost their views by their definition of what a “view” actually is. Facebook may have taken the concept of
viewing something a bit too literally because, according to them, a video is “viewed”
when it plays for at least three seconds (even with the sound off). Joking aside, they obviously do this
intentionally, and when mixed with the auto-play feature (which is set by
default), it means that scrolling slowly enough through your feed counts as a
view for any video you pass. Obviously
Facebook wouldn’t want to argue on semantics here though because a view is a
view, right?
It’s
reasonable that Facebook would want to get into the viral video business as it
is a huge draw of people attention and, therefore, money from advertisers that
want to advertise wherever there are a lot of people, but their complete lack
of care for respecting original content and its creators is unacceptable. According to the video, Facebook has made
statements that it wants to change its policy and try to fix its stolen content
problem, but it’s hard to trust their word when they try so desperately to beat
out YouTube and other sites in views. It’s
not like there is any perfect way to deal with the problem of stolen content on
the Internet (aside from heavily restricting and changing how we have come to
know it), but large corporations like Facebook have no excuse for not putting
heavy effort into combating this problem to the best of their ability.
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