“40% of Facebook traffic is stolen content”

According to Jeff Alleneng, a former Facebook data scientist, 40% of Facebook traffic in 2018 was directed to stolen content pages.

According to a 2018 survey, about 40% of traffic to Facebook pages was stolen content, 20% was original content, and the rest was directed to pages run by companies. Allen has been appealing for the need to take an active role in this issue of copyright infringement.

However, the research team pointed out that unlike YouTube, which actively cracked down on infringing content for fear of lawsuits by rights owners, Facebook was not very active. If a legal expert identifies copyright-infringing content and then decides to hand over content that misinterprets copyright, there are cases where a lawsuit is filed against the rights owner, and this is why Facebook does not need to actively combat copyright-infringing content. .

Allen, who left Facebook in 2019, once introduced how to create a popular Facebook page in an in-house presentation. The trick is to find popular communities, collect popular content within them, and repost them on new pages. Allen et al. say this method is easy and effective.

In fact, a Facebook survey in 2021 showed that this method was effective. According to the survey, 15 of the 20 most popular content in the second quarter of 2021 were stolen from other Facebook pages and copied from other platforms such as Twitter. In the third quarter survey, all of the top 20 items were stolen content.

In 2021, Facebook announced that it had taken steps to address the issues raised by Allen et al., such as building the technology over several years and actively removing the stolen content. Some say it’s not strong enough to make you stay.

After working as a data scientist for the Democratic National Committee of the United States, Allen co-founded a group to study and address the social risks of internet platforms and started investigating platforms, including Facebook. Allen points out that the law is hesitant to force Facebook to take action against pirated content. Related information can be found here.