In a move that mirrors the recent YouTube crackdown on identifying “mass-produced and repetitious content,” Meta also wants to protect “original” content on its social media platform, Facebook.
The social media giant announced in a blog post that they are “introducing stronger measures to reduce unoriginal content on Facebook and ultimately protect and elevate creators sharing original content.”
This move complements the action that was carried out by Meta in the first half of the year, when the company said it had deleted about 10 million Facebook profiles that were impersonating big content creators and making money from their contents.
In addition to this, the social media giant also announced that they took “action on around 500,000 accounts engaged in spammy behaviour or fake engagement,” where they applied measures like not promoting comments from these accounts, and impeding the traction of their contents to prevent them from monetising the “unoriginal” content.
According to Meta, the concept of “unoriginal” content is when a Facebook user “reuses or repurposes another creator’s content repeatedly without crediting them, taking advantage of their creativity and hard work.” It is for this reason Meta introduced new and stronger measures to curb this activity as well as encourage original content with good storytelling.
“Accounts that improperly reuse someone else’s videos, photos or text posts repeatedly will not only lose access to Facebook monetisation programmes for a period of time, but will also receive reduced distribution on everything that they share,” one of the measures according to Meta’s blog post.
Meta also adds that to properly award content creators who fully put in the work in creating original content, they’ll reduce the duplicated distribution of such content on the platform so that the original creator can fully get the visibility they worked for. To support this, the social media giant will introduce a content-tracing tech feature that will link duplicate videos to the original creator, ensuring that the original post gets rightful credit.
To Facebook’s content creators who want to make sure they keep making money from the social media platform, Meta advises them to strictly stick to posting original content that tells a meaningful story. The social media company also says to avoid using third-party watermarks that often signal recycled content, to write thoughtful captions, and to avoid overusing hashtags or capital letters in the captions.
To help creators adapt to this new structure, Meta introduced a suite of new tools and features incorporated into the social media app. These features include a professional dashboard that offers detailed post-level insights for content tracking and content performance analysis, as well as assessments where creators can see if their content is at risk of restriction or demonetization.
By targeting millions of unoriginal content, especially in the wake of AI currently mass producing content, Meta is cleaning up Facebook with this move to reshape the direction of online content and award originality amongst the platform’s content makers.
