Viral Video Claims To Show ‘How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views’

After the two uploaded the video to YouTube and pulled in ten million total views, Neistat told Adweek he and Wellens discovered internet users had illegally ripped their “Aladdin” video, in which they’d both invested a significant amount of time and money.

A YouTube video has surfaced that accuses Facebook Inc. Apparently, the original creator did not receive either the credit for the same and also lost out on ad revenues from the 89 million views which might have been substantial.

The video says “freebooting”, the stealing of videos is happening more and more often.

To reach 86 million people via a Facebook ad, Gibson would have needed to pay thousands of dollars (assuming an average CPM of assuming an average CPM of assuming an average CPM of $0.25.25.25.) But by using people’s videos seemingly without permission, he’s getting all that exposure for free. The News Feed algorithm is known to promote Facebook’s player over YouTube’s player, so that ultimately everyone sees Facebook videos.

Most people watch entertaining or educational videos online, and never really spend any time considering how this kind of content is created, shared, and monetized. And it complains that the thief “doesn’t have to fear negative consequences at all”.

“It just feels like a violation to be treated like that.”

Business Insider has contacted Facebook and Tyrese Gibson‘s talent agency, Red Entertainment, for comment.

Facebook said it was making improvements to its procedures to make it easier to remove infringing content and to keep repeat infringers off the platform.

Facebook published an entire blog post about video management, referencing freebooting, in August. The company said it had heard from a few video publishers that there were ways in which it could be doing a better job and that it was taking steps in response.

Plus it’s unclear what Facebook’s policy is for users who post copyrighted video. In addition to employing Audible Magic, Facebook has been building video matching technology that will be available to a “subset of creators”. According to the same source, Facebook is adding a hit to the views counter after users have watched three seconds of a video, which, if that’s the case, would be rather unfair, since whenever you scroll pass a video it plays automatically.