Facebook has long been accused of ignoring an issue where people would take other people’s videos and repost them on the social network as their own. This was an easy way to get a lot of likes and shares, which can lead to a lot of new followers for a given page. The process is known as “Freebooting.”
According to a recent announcement, Facebook is beta testing a new video matching technology, which will allow the creators of videos to quickly identify where their videos are being shared and have them reported to Facebook for removal. The announcement from Facebook said, “Our matching tool will evaluate millions of video uploads quickly and accurately, and when matches are surfaced, publishers will be able to report them to us for removal.
The current version is only being tested by a very limited number of media companies and multi-channel network creators. It will, however, be rolled out to a bigger audience after the beta testing is completed.
Once the service is accessible to all video content creators it will make it much more difficult for ‘gray/black hat’ marketers to get the free video content they were using to drive traffic. It will also likely increase the effectiveness of content creators because people will be more likely to share their original videos rather than the copies from other places on the net.
There is no word yet on when the tool will be ready for roll out to the full Facebook audience.
