Cut the photo plagiarism with Google Search

I've been seeing a lot of articles on how to enhance the value of Steemit. I particularly liked this article, "Deceptively Optimistic Self-Shilling Posts Hurt Steemit", by @kyriacos. The comments are quite insightful, too.

I've also seen a few comments about plagiarism, particularly about text plagiarism. It's obvious that such plagiarism can impair the value of Steemit, but what is not so obvious is that search engines are going to bring up the Steemit post and the original post if plagiarism has occurred. This can hurt the reputation of Steemit in the eyes of good writers, and those aspiring to greatness as a writer.

So, to do my bit to preserve and enhance the value of Steemit, I've started to flag posts where it's obvious that there is photo plagiarism. It's easy to do in Chrome. When I see a photo that looks more like a sales pitch than a personal experience, I right-click on the photo and select "Search Google for image" and anything that even looks close to the one in the post will come up. It just takes a few seconds to do.

What I find somewhat short of breathtaking is that the people who post the photos seem to be unaware of how easy this is to spot with a quick search on Google (or your search engine of choice). Just today, I found what appeared to be a clear case of plagiarism, but I wasn't sure. So I wrote a reply with a few suggestions rather than flagging, just in case the author of that blog post was indeed also an author of a website and a YouTube channel that came up when I searched for the pictures in the blog.

He was new and had only two posts, so I thought, "Good, we can nip it in the bud". I suggested that he write an "introduce myself" blog clearly establishing his relationship to the the sources of the images he intends to use. I also suggested that he provide attribution for the images even if they were not his to post. I also pointed out that by taking the aforementioned actions, he could preserve the value of his posts by avoiding a flag on his posts by people like me.

I'm not so much concerned about the legal implications of copying the pictures, as I'm more concerned that Steemit could develop a reputation for rewarding people who choose not to create their own content. I also know that for some kids, this is a "mashup world" and they may think it natural to do something like that. But this is Steemit. Either we're going to produce original quality content and promote it, or we're going to copy the work of others and not learn how to create content worth the effort to copy (just thinking of Francis Ford Coppola here, and I mean it in a good way).

 I hope you find this post useful and helpful. Steemit is what we make it to be. Let's make it original.