Waking up in Geelong

As someone who posts a lot of photographs online, seeing them shared elsewhere without permission – and often without any credit – is a given. But a few weeks ago while browsing Facebook I found something particularly brazen – a page called ‘Viral Media’ that I had never heard of before, but which was posting photos of Victorian trains by the thousands. So who the hell was behind it?

Doing some investigation

A check of the Facebook page details for Viral Media just made me more confused – absolutely nothing about trains to be seen at all.

Just this completely unrelated blurb.

Explore the history and latest updates of Royal Families worldwide. Dive into stories of tradition, power, legacy access generations.

And the page owners – they’re in Indonesia.

My immediate thought was “they’re reposting stolen photos” – but where were the photos coming from?

Unfortunately Google broke their ‘Reverse Images Search’ a year or two ago as part of their pivot to ‘Google Lens’, so I didn’t have much luck finding the original photographer of the stolen photos that way. However by assuming that the captions for the photos were also stolen, I did get some leads.

One example being this post from 2024 by Facebook user ‘Tcn353‘.

Having confirmed that the ‘Viral Media’ page was just stealing content, I made a post to one of the Facebook groups that I was a member of, telling other people to stop resharing the stolen content, in an attempt to limit it’s spread.

But unfortunately getting Facebook to take down the page is a more difficult matter – they have a Copyright Report Form, but they only accept reports from the copyright owner – not on behalf of other people.

A report alleging infringement of intellectual property rights must come from the rights owner or someone authorised to report on their behalf (e.g. attorney, agent). If you are not the rights owner or their authorised representative, we will not be able to process your report. If you believe that others’ rights may be infringed, you may wish to ask them to review the Intellectual property section of the Help Centre.

And since none of the photos they had stolen were mine, I had reached a dead end.

Attacking it from another angle

After I made my Facebook post about the stolen photos, a group member asked whether it was fine to reshare my post, as they had come up with another tactic – track down the photographers of the stolen photos, and get them to submit the copyright takedown requests.

And to Facebook’s credit, that actually worked – a day or two later the ‘Viral Media’ page and all of their stolen photos were no more.

But why?

You might now be asking – why would some random Facebook page be reposting stolen train photos in the thousands in the first place?

The answer is the “Facebook Content Monetization” program – post enough interesting content to Facebook, and they will give you a share of their advertising revenue.

Since we announced Facebook-funded monetization in 2017, more than four million content creators have earned money on Facebook. As we’ve expanded from just providing monetization for longer videos to also include Reels and posts, overall payouts have grown. In the past year, Facebook has paid content creators more than $2 billion for videos, reels, photo and text posts. During that time, payouts for reels and short videos have grown more than 80%.

And the amount of money you can get through this program? My Wongm’s Rail Gallery Facebook page become eligible a few years ago, with thanks to my 5.3k followers checking out the things that I post, I get paid out somewhere between US$50 and US$80 a month by Facebook.

Given the hours of work each month I spend editing photos and writing blog posts, I’m not going to be able to quit my day job. But for someone living in a low income country, and using a bot to repost stolen content, it’s actually pretty profitable – leading to an explosion in ‘AI slop’ on Facebook.

Human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online.

There is a dual problem with this: It not only floods the internet with shit, crowding out human-created content that real people spend time making, but the very nature of AI slop means it evolves faster than human-created content can, so any time an algorithm is tweaked, the AI spammers can find the weakness in that algorithm and exploit it.

Human creators making traditional YouTube videos, Instagram Reels, or TikToks are often making videos that are designed to appeal to a given platform’s algorithm, but humans are not nearly as good at this as AI.

This means that people running AI-generated accounts can have hundreds or thousands of entries into the algorithmic lottery every day, and can hammer the algorithm once they find something that works. Brute force.

“If you can figure out how to post content at scale, that means you can figure out how to exploit weaknesses at scale,” a former Meta employee who worked on content policy told me when I asked them about the AI spamming strategy for an article in August.

And in the case of the ‘Viral Media’ page that is exactly what they did – their attempt at reposting stolen content about Royal Families worldwide didn’t get any traction, so they pivoted to some other niche, before eventually ending up on photos of Victorian trains.

But there was one thing they didn’t count on – a dedicated community that wouldn’t put up with having their own content stolen.

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