Fighting Steemit plagiarism, one minnow at a time

Recently I've been working with the fine people in the Hive account@steemflagrewards community to deal with some of the abuse of this platform. That can include bot abuse, rampant self-votes and vote farming. They are mostly going after smaller cases as they just don't have the SP to tackly larger fish. You can help by delegating to them as I have done. Hive account@admiralbot and Hive account@flagawhale are also part of this. I also support Hive account@church-of-piglet who is doing good work. Delegation is a very useful tool for this as your SP can be doing good without you having to be on Steemit all day. There are efforts to further automate these bots so the team don't need to work so hard. They are not earning much from this.

Whilst hanging around their Discord channel I saw mention of a possible plagiarist. That's a serious issue that we have to address as it harms to image of Steemit. It's tempting for new users to just copy content from the web and post it as their own. Fortunately it's often trivial to Google part of the text and find the original.

That case was some posts by Hive account@amil9672 such as this story that was posted with no information to confirm he wrote it.

I soon found another copy on Wikia and challenged him on it. He claimed it was co-written with his sister. I said we needed proof and eventually got a comment by her on the story to confirm the Steemit post had her consent. We need this sort of proof.

I'll note that Amil had done at least one other post that was really copied and he's been told off about that. We have to appreciate that a lot of people will come here with no idea of what is acceptable and they may just get hammered with flags. If we can take time to educate them then they may stick around. He's now linked back to the original story and given credit.

So a happy ending this time, but we have to stay vigilant. If you see abuse you can report it to an approriate chatroom or to Steemcleaners.

Something I learned about yesterday is that Steemit do deal with accounts that are being used for vote farming and other purposes. They can withdraw their delegation so those accounts can do no damage. I believe they rely on some witnesses to compile the blacklists.

If you know of other places to report cases or of bots that deal with them and need support then please mention them in the comments.

Steem on!

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