Copyright advocate CreativeFuture reported that Amazon has been calling upon Facebook and other social media platforms to do a better job in shutting down fraudulent product reviews, which led CreativeFuture to compare Amazon’s concerns with its own concerns about media piracy.
While Facebook claims that it received about 100,000 reports of copyright infringement in just the month of December 2020 – and had removed as many as 2 million items per month for intellectual property concerns from July through December 2020 alone – these removals accounted for only 75%-80% of piracy on Facebook, meaning that as much as a quarter of this illegal content remains online – which Facebook doesn’t report, according to CreativeFuture.
Read the full article via CreativeFuture
Why it matters
Facebook’s revenue model is driven by advertising. If consumers find their way to infringing instances of premium content through Facebook, shouldn’t concerns over piracy take a higher priority even though it’s driving ad impressions?
Certainly the company claims so, and CreativeFuture reminds us that since Facebook made nearly $29 billion in ad revenue during Q2 of 2021, it can well afford to be more diligent in policing for and shutting down illegal access to copyrighted content.
Not only are fraudulent instances of legitimate content on Facebook a concern, but so is its inverse: Facebook ads on fraudulent apps. A Digital Citizens Alliance report released this August found that Facebook ads appeared on 27% of all pirate apps researched, making Facebook the number two advertiser (behind Amazon and ahead of Google) found on piracy apps.
