An internal September 2018 Facebook memo found ~40% of traffic to Pages went to those with plagiarized or recycled content
Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @learmonth , @danieldrepper , @ericgarland , @epro , @arpcomics , @mattrosoff , @jeffhorwitz , @jason_kint , @jason_kint , and @jason_kint Tweets: Michael Learmonth / @learmonth : Scrape/aggregate, take all the ad money https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ Daniel Drepper / @danieldrepper : This👇 https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Eric Garland / @ericgarland : Seems like the intellectual property lawsuits should render this company a penny stock within months... https://twitter.com/... Emil Protalinski / @epro : Purposefully looking the other way because “growth hacking” https://twitter.com/... @arpcomics : Oh. Kinda like all the crap websites all over the web mucking up legit info in search results. Fb & Google have major, earth-threatening issues that they are either choosing to ignore on principal, or are being paid to allow. https://twitter.com/... Matt Rosoff / @mattrosoff : Now do the web. https://twitter.com/... Jeff Horwitz / @jeffhorwitz : For all of Meta's talk about creators , what's the surest route to a mass audience on its platform? Sticky fingers. That's per @keachhagey review of the Facebook files documents (and the company's own “top content” list published today.) https://www.wsj.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : And yes, full disclosure. These are our @DCNorg members - Complex and Bloomberg - who invest in their storytelling and news, so yeah I take this seriously. https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Aaargh. Typo above. I hear there is a new service for fixing it. Back to this report. I immediately wonder if there is an offline Sandberg or Zuckerberg meeting with Alex Schultz. There normally is when a decision is made to choose growth hacking profit over people. 2/2 https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Holt crap. Facebook is a crime scene, “About 40% of the traffic to Facebook pages at one point in 2018 went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content, according to a research report that year by Facebook...” 1/2 https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This memo surfaces in the middle of a run of leaked internal Facebook documents: earlier reporting showed Zuckerberg and other executives shelved damning research into the platform's polarizing effect, and fifteen journalists described a company that manages coverage on the record. The September 2018 memo adds a quantitative layer — an internal estimate that ~40% of Page traffic went to plagiarized or recycled content.
It pairs with the [[a:970846|internal report finding Eastern European troll farms reached 140M US users a month before the 2020 election]], where 75% of those users followed none of the Pages involved. Together they sketch a distribution system whose economics reward scraping and farming over original publishing.
First-order effects
- Original publishers compete for News Feed attention against pages copying their work, with the memo indicating close to half of Page traffic already flowing to recycled material.
- Facebook's advertising revenue is built partly on that traffic, meaning monetized distribution of unlicensed copies of others' content was known internally by 2018.
Second-order effects
- Rights holders and publishers gain a documented internal metric to anchor licensing demands and litigation claims against Meta over scraped content.
- The troll-farms report shows the same mechanics at work on political content — amplification reaching users who never opted in — giving advertisers and regulators a second, overlapping case against the ranking system.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across these disclosures, pressure shifts from voluntary product fixes toward external rules on platform distribution incentives — copyright enforcement and algorithmic-accountability regulation aimed at how feeds rank content.
- The recurring gap between internal knowledge and executive action, visible here and in the shelved polarizing-effect research, becomes the central argument in the case for independent audits of recommendation systems.
The trend: Leaked internal documents are systematically exposing how platform ranking economics reward recycled, scraped, and farmed content over original publishers.