Hi Steemian family,

Today we're talking about plagiarists, comment spammers and shitposters. Obviously we all know that whales with their mighty steem power can flag this stuff right out the sea. However is it solely up to them to police our shores? What can we minnows and dolphins do to help keep the Steemit ocean clean?

Sammy mentioned this post in today's SMG discussion about the growing issue of plagiarism on the platform. It seems we are all noticing this more and more so it's obviously a very present and relevant problem.

@Playfulfoodie brings up some great points and some solid advice in her article, well worth the read. By the way if you see this please feel welcome to join our discussion in the mastermind group. I found myself agreeing with your stance on flagging although in reflection I had yet to flag anyone myself.

In her post she summarizes that it is all our duty to:

Please help keep the platform free of this kind of abuse. It takes all of us to keep a watchful eye. Don't be afraid to use your flag. If you are afraid of retaliation, you can report to Steemcleaners instead, so you won't have to challenge anyone yourself.

I guess following on from yesterdays conversation about bots, I'd always thought plagiarism would be taken care of automatically. However now I'm realizing it is as much our individual responsibility to protect our reputation as much as the bots and whales.

"Don't worry @Cheetah will catch em all!!"

In the past I've been guilty of passing the bot-buck and I even told others not to worry about it as if it's not important. Sure @Cheetah does a great job finding copied content. However this is not absolute evidence of plagiarism, often times it simply links back to the authors own blog.

Often this can be a useful tool to verify and add credibility to your work.

I always advise people who get them to respond to @Cheetah's comments. This way other Steemians can see that you the author are acknowledging it as copied and may possibly avoid any hasty flaggers. Also if you've yet to provide your sources or quoted incorrectly then you have the added reminder to do so before your 7 day editing window is up.

One up for friendly bots!

So thanks to @playfulfoodie, I now feel inspired to do my part! Well I'm not going out my way to search and destroy any plagiarizers but I will be putting the smack down on anyone who crops up in my sights!

Well hold on what do we have here then..?

I didn't have to look very far before I realized damn, they really are multiplying all around us. This guy @sshh is looking to be honored with my first ever FLAG!

At first glance this attention seeker was pretty honest looking, I almost fell for it myself. Then a simple look at his comments feed revealed that he was indeed a "shitposter".

Here is someone who copy/pastes comments all over the place. Not really adding much value to the community and I honestly don't get why these people feel to do it?

Then looking at the profile more closely none of the posts made any sense? Somehow avoiding @Cheetah's detection but quite clearly copying text from elsewhere, compiling shitposts to make a quick buck and then not even succeeding much at that either!

The time has come, I'm flagging my first user..

Well that felt weird, I don't really like policing others. It seemed like a bit of a libertarian contradiction to me at first, until I switched my perspective. We as a decentralized community have to accept responsibility for ourselves.

I thought I was done for the day and then it's funny how law of attraction works isn't it.. when we pay attention to a thing we attract more of the same. This guy on twitter got my attention with his flurry of tweets..

Funny enough I looked for the upvote and saw a new comment which has now been edited, however since we're on a blockchain I'm sure there's some way we can see what was originally there?

This "Cryptojoke" guy accidentally revealed himself as the owner of the @ricegum profile here. Which by the way is also the stolen username of a presumably unrelated yet famous YouTube/Twitch gamer..

This @ricegum character is a shady piece of work, I indeed checked his account and what I found was a perfect example of why we as a community must police this type of behavior if we are to convince new users it is not a scam site!

As you can see, this plagiarizer has cashed quite a few well paid posts and was caught out over a year ago. So for many it comes as no surprise, however @Stellabelle did ask for social media verification back then. Perhaps this adds another missing piece to that puzzle but like I said it's old news.

You can read HERE how this scumbag pretended to be a model named Layla. Then played on peoples emotions by plagiarizing sexual abuse and abortion stories from reddit to cash in on Steemian sympathy.

Even though it was a year ago I flagged the shit out of as much as I could since his rep score is still at 55 and I don't appreciate some snide bullshitter trying to hit me up with "just want to help a brother :D".

So what's the point in bringing it up now then?

Well it just goes to show how this problem is rife and in just the past 24hrs alone I've found two plagiarizing shitposters living right under my nose. They will surely poison this website from the inside out unless we as a community make it clear we will not accept this behavior.

Yes our friendly bots are doing their thing and in my opinion are a great asset to our platform. However it's clear by these two examples that they do not pick up on everything. More can and must be done by our human selves, if we see it we must flag and report it to @steemcleaners!

Thank you @samstonehill and @playfulfoodie for bringing this topic to our attention at steemit mastermind group.

We will be sure to take every action we can to keep Steemit clear of plagiarism and shitposts!

Wholeness.

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