Increasing Problem of Plagiarism Due to Social Media

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Date: December 31, 2018

As the media has been advancing, it has become difficult to avoid plagiarism.

Plagiarism in its many forms has become a part of the social world. The content we see and share daily on different social networking websites is mostly disregarded of its origination. There either is considered no requirement to use the original source of such content or information or there is not much space provided by the websites to share the information as well as the source in detail; this happens in the case of Twitter.

In the case of a website like

Facebook and LinkedIn, posts that include pictures, information and images are shared widely without any reference of the original author. It has just recently been observed that due to some changes in Facebook, now if you share a post, it shows that the post was shared from the original author.

This has probably been done to make sure credit goes to the originator and not the followers and those who share it further.

However, there is still an increasing problem of plagiarism due to social media being an important part of this modern world. Tweets on Twitter have a limitation of characters that can be posted, making it difficult to convey even the message, making it impossible to share the source at all.

Moreover, it is not even considered important to cite references in many cases. Most of the people think plagiarism is committed only when content by an expert is used without reference. Well, that is not true. Be it any content by anyone and in any form, copying it falls under plagiarism.

Viral Plagiarism

There is a lot of stuff that goes viral on different social websites. Sometimes information being shared includes credit to the original author; however, on its way through all this sharing, it loses the credit and sometimes even its originality. Virally shared informal text is usually not considered as plagiarism and s shared without any credit at all to the author. This is a never-ending and increasing problem of plagiarism due to social media.

Penalization by Search Engines

Search Engines like Google penalize websites that tend to copy content from other websites. These websites are ranked low by Google so that they don’t show up in the initial pages of the search when similar websites are searched. Moreover, if authentic reports are received by Google from multiple users, the website may not show up in the results at all.

It’s in the Air

The rate at which plagiarism is rising is startling. Due to social media, it has become very common to use others’ statuses, posts, and pictures. The major problem is that there is an option to download pictures posted by others and share them at your own choice.

So, if you are uploading pictures after copying them from somewhere, there’s no way to find out where did you get it from unless you add the source, which happens once in a blue moon.

Available software

The market by using which you can check if posts on social media were plagiarized. It might take a minute or two extra to give credit to the owner of the content, but how much time it would have taken for you to create something like this;

probably much more than that. So better be a responsible social media user and give credit to those who have created the content or posts, no matter how formal or informal they are. After all, they were worth sharing and hence worth giving credit for.