Are Facebook slop cops just there to fatten up the content pig?

"Unoriginal" content is to be purged under new Facebook rules. Is this altruism, or another step in taking more than it gets from creators?

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:14, 17 July 2025

Hot on the heels of YouTube's "inauthentic" content purge, Facebook this week have announced a crackdown on "unoriginal" content. Is this the creation of platform slop cops, and if so, why now?

On the face of it, this move could favour publishers. Currently, placing your lovingly polished original content on Facebook feels like racing a brand new Ferrari in a demolition derby. The tone of the platform is seemingly set by the trash, and anything higher quality is going to be trashed by association.

In this case, the word "unoriginal" means Facebook is going after rip-offs of other people's stuff, and it says ""Unoriginal content reuses or repurposes another creator's content repeatedly without crediting them, taking advantage of their creativity and hard work." It could be regarded as a first stage for what needs to be done. 

For me the most startling thing about this about-face is how bad it got before it was addressed, and how it was allowed to happen, in a slide towards awful which - while apparently not harming FB in financial terms - has definitely soured the user experience. Digital platform incumbency is a powerful position to enjoy, even if unmerited. 

Could it be that Meta sees Facebook, unloved and unlovely, as a type of content liferaft? "We don't know what else to do with it, so let's tidy it up and make it for original stuff only - it's better for the AI."

If true, it's a glimmer of hope for our industry. Yet, I still think we'd be fools to trust them - an opinion formed by watching how we have bent to Google and FB's will over the past couple of decades and what good it did us (remember the collective effort to serve up Facebook Instant Articles, anyone?).

Indeed, if we allowed our content to sink to such derivative depths as FB has been allowing, we'd all be out of business. Yet those stories and posts thrived on advertising dollars, for adverts of extremely dubious targeting, which means Facebook made bank on them too.

However, if there is a serious effort to make the platform a home to original content, I welcome it. It might be only an umbrella in a storm, but at least it's an umbrella in a storm. They could of course have done this 10 years ago, when its old mantra "move fast and break things" was vaguely remembered, where now its fast moves are to be feared for inadvertent error rather than groundbreaking change, as exampled by the recent and utterly unjust suspension of a huge number of Facebook Groups.

It would be doing you a disservice not to point out the obvious shadow being cast over original content here, the shadow of GenAI. Put bluntly, if Facebook and YouTube are suddenly tidying up the trash and bringing in the slop cops to decide what's good and what's not - why now?

A platform with higher quality original content would also serve as a nice data harvesting farm, wouldn't it?

We are only recently seeing the consequences of what happens when GenAI farms GenAI, and it's not pretty. It's certainly one of the reasons behind YouTube's content purge and frankly we'd be ocean-going buffoons to believe it's any different with Meta. The slop cops are working for the man, and not for you.

As TechCrunch points out, while the "unoriginal" content purge seems to be trying to smoke out reposters and straight up thieves, there is an element of GenAI proofing there too. 

It reports: "Meta’s update seemingly only focuses on reused content, but its post suggests that it may be taking AI slop into consideration, too. In a section where the company offers 'tips' for making original content, Meta notes that creators shouldn’t just be 'stitching together clips' or adding their watermark when using content from other sources, and they should focus on 'authentic storytelling,' not short videos offering little value."

So, while attempting to raise the bar for content quality is laudable, I can't help but think the original content creators that Facebook wishes to woo might be like prize pigs being offered the finest acorns while hearing a knife being sharpened.

It's not great to be so cynical, but don't forget, they made us this way.