Facebook to Fight Unoriginal Content

Earlier this month, YouTube announced that it would begin demonetizing channels specializing in “inauthentic” content. Although the announcement was light on details, the company stated that it was targeting “mass-produced and repetitious content.”

The new policy took effect yesterday, July 15, 2025.

However, one day before that, Facebook announced its fight against “unoriginal content” and offered far more details as to what that entails.

According to their announcement, the initiative launched in April as part of a crackdown on “spammy content” across all of Meta’s services. On the Facebook side, the company said that it “took action on around 500,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior or fake engagement.” They also claim to have taken down around 10 million profiles impersonating larger content creators.

However, the blog post states that Facebook is now taking it even further. They say that accounts that “improperly reuse someone else’s videos, photos or text posts repeatedly” will not only lose access to Facebook monetization, but will receive “reduced distribution on everything they share.”

The goal of this isn’t only to support original creators but also to enhance user feeds by ensuring content isn’t endlessly repeated. The post clarifies that you can still create new work based on existing ones, but only if you make “meaningful enhancements” to the content.

The post also advises against using content with third-party watermarks, as they indicate recycled content, and recommends ensuring videos have high-quality captions.

All in all, it’s a potentially significant shift for Facebook. But there’s one crucial question: Why now?

A Checkered Past

For over a decade, Facebook has faced strong criticism for its handling of unoriginal or even copyright-infringing content.

In April 2015, the company was widely criticized for favoring videos uploaded to YouTube over YouTube embeds. This created a perverse incentive where accounts would reupload YouTube videos to Facebook and rack up significant views.

The problem persisted in the wake of the controversy. By 2018, users had begun to refer to the practice as “freebooting” and noticed that it was almost exclusively a problem for Facebook.

However, the problem wasn’t limited to videos alone. Both images and text posts were copied repeatedly. According to a 2021 study, 15 of the top 20 posts on Facebook were found to be unoriginal content. In short, Facebook was thriving on the back of unattributed content from outside the site.

To be clear, Meta has been taking steps to address these issues. In 2016, Meta launched its Rights Manager tool. In September 2020, it was expanded to protect images. In June 2022, it was further expanded to include independent audio rights holders.

However, those steps have not significantly improved Facebook’s reputation as a haven for unoriginal content. This has been especially noted by teens, who have largely stopped using Facebook in favor of YouTube and TikTok.

Can this latest effort turn things around? Probably not. But at least they are trying something different.

Using the Algorithm

The big difference in this latest announcement isn’t the removal of the accounts or the efforts to demonetize unoriginal content; it’s the use of the algorithm.

Nearly all of Facebook’s content problems can be traced back to the fact that the algorithm has historically rewarded unoriginal work. Why organically share a post when copying and pasting it without attribution gets more clicks and views? Why embed a video or share a link when reuploading the content gets far more traffic?

The Facebook algorithm has historically made it virtually impossible to succeed with original content, especially content that originates from other sites. Spammers posted unoriginal content because it was what worked.

If Facebook can genuinely reduce or eliminate that incentive, it could have a significant impact. Targeting monetization is smart, but using the algorithm to bury unoriginal content is potentially even better.

None of the work Facebook does on banning accounts or identifying infringing works will ever mean anything if unoriginal content is ultimately rewarded. As we have seen many times over, users will find ways around roadblocks if the path is still the shortest.

But that raises the obvious question: Will it work? I don’t know. It depends on how serious Facebook is about this change. If uploading unoriginal content ceases to be an effective tactic, it could have a significant impact. But if there are easy ways around this system or the effects are minor, it won’t.

But then I have to raise another question: Why now? It seems pretty late for Facebook to begin making this push.

Too Little, Too Late?

To be clear, these are good moves, and I appreciate that Facebook provided some degree of clarity about what it is trying to do. This approach, if done well, could represent a major shift in the landscape.

But it’s a shift that’s almost a decade overdue.

Facebook first ran into this issue in 2015. They had the tools in place to implement a robust solution by 2016. It’s almost a decade since then, and just now, Facebook is making this major push against unoriginal content.

Part of the problem is likely Facebook’s struggles. The site has been largely surpassed by YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and Meta’s own Instagram as a platform for content discovery. Facebook remains very popular and successful, but it’s no longer a primary destination for discovering new material.

Since creators perform better on other platforms, they tend to focus on those platforms. Facebook is hoping to reverse the self-feeding loop and reward/promote creators on its platform. They hope it will bring more creators back to the site, and that, in turn, will attract visitors eager to discover that content.

But that raises another problem. Much of Facebook’s issue with unoriginal content has nothing to do with Facebook creators. It’s content from third-party sites being reshared without attribution on Facebook.

If you do not have access to Facebook Rights Manager, which requires a Facebook account and is tied to a specific page, there’s not much indication that this will help you. Instead, it may boost the first infringer rather than the original creator.

Creators who aren’t a part of Rights Manager need to be vigilant over the coming months and report infringing content. It will be interesting to see how those reports are weighed.

But no matter how well this new crackdown goes, it would have been much easier to turn the tide a decade ago. The problem is that it wasn’t hurting Facebook again, so they didn’t treat it as a problem to solve.

Bottom Line

To be clear, I think that Facebook is taking some excellent steps here. Original creators who upload their work to Facebook have a lot of reason to be happy. Even those outside the Facebook ecosystem have grounds for cautious optimism.

Facebook is doing what it should have been doing 10 years ago. It’s using its algorithm to demote unoriginal content and support actual content creators. Whether it will work is impossible to predict. It largely depends on whether this is a serious effort by Facebook or just lip service to the idea.

The heartbreaking part is that if Facebook had taken these steps a decade ago, it could have completely changed the Facebook ecosystem. Many of the gripes that creators and users alike have about Facebook would have been addressed.

Now may simply be too late. Facebook has had a poor reputation for original content for years, and it’s not going to change overnight, if at all.

YouTube, by contrast, released Content ID in 2007, just two years after Google purchased it. This wasn’t just an effort to appease larger rightsholders or head off copyright issues. YouTube wanted to be a place for original creators. They realized that, to build that, they needed to level the playing field between creators and copycats.

New creators wouldn’t have flourished if the site were just known for pirated TV episodes and endless reuploads. By taking steps to block unoriginal content (including both on and off the platform), YouTube created its current ecosystem.

Is it perfect? No. It is still deeply flawed in many ways. But it’s far better than Facebook’s when it comes to original content.

For Facebook, this may be a case of too little, too late. Other platforms have taken the content discovery crown, and they are unlikely to relinquish it. Facebook had its chance and missed the moment. While I don’t think this will hurt Facebook financially, it is still ubiquitous for other reasons; it’s not a content discovery engine.

And in a space where attention is everything, that is a major problem.