HackerTube

Facebook Freebooting - Smarter Every Day 128

SmarterEveryDay1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2015–2019
YouTube
commentary · general · 2015–2019 on HN

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains 'Facebook freebooting', where Facebook users re-upload YouTubers' videos natively and the original creators lose views and revenue. He describes his own attempts to get Facebook to act.

HN cites it as the first-hand account of video piracy on Facebook whenever the platform's treatment of creators comes up.

10 comments from Hacker News

@pen2l2015-07 · in “Facebook’s Piracy Problem”

Did you watch his video where he explains his views himself? I find it pretty convincing: ▶ this video Interestingly, a lot of people are getting very frustrated with Facebook for other reasons as well. Famously, there's Veritasium's video: link I can really appreciate what they're feeling. With piracy as we have traditionally known it, at least usually the pirate is not directly profiting from his act of piracy. With freebooting, Facebook is literally profiting from other people's work. It's directly diverting money flow from the creator (who REALLY NEED THE MONEY) to Facebook. I think it's plainly ridiculous this is happening, and obviously Facebook will turn a blind eye to it because it's making them money. This is one of the reasons why I encourage whitehat security researchers to turn a little gray when it comes to Facebook and do things to bring them down, it'll be for the greater good to bring the behemoth down.

Recommends View on HN
@wolph2019-07 · in “Facebook is embedding tracking data inside the photos you download”

It's apparently a bit of a hassle to get it removed at times though. And in most cases far to late for it to really matter: ▶ this video

@TAForObvReasons2018-05 · in “EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line”

It's absolutely insane that freebooting [1] on Facebook was allowed to persist for so long. It's easy to see the right to monetary remuneration as a method of addressing a massive loophole exploited by Facebook and certain users for years. [1] ▶ this video

@Ralfp2016-05 · in “Fox 'uses' a gameplay video from YouTube, and removes the original with DMCA”

SmarterEveryDay told a story in one of his videos about slow-mo clip of tatoo machine in action being ripped from one of his movies by the large press publisher, Bauer, and reuploaded on Bauer's Facebook page. Then Bauer moved on to claim DMCA on his original uploaded by him on his Facebook page: ▶ this video

@pdkl952016-01 · in “Facebook ad click numbers are inconsistent with other analytics”

Facebook has a history of fraud in their other services. Veritasium fell victim to FB's scams as a publisher a couple years ago[1]. I know first-hand that Facebook's advertising model is deeply flawed. When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless. They also have a history of encouraging video fraud[2][3]. [1] link [2] ▶ this video [3] link