Surfknasen's Search for Scoundrels (Tips on Finding Plagiarism)

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There is lots and lots of plagiarism on the Steem blockchain. Recently, I’ve started hunting plagiarisers because it feels nice and rewarding to do something good, in this case catching plagiarisers. Also, you get a small reward if you report it to Steemcleaners. I’m not very good at finding plagiarisers myself, but I thought I’d share a few of my methods to finding if a post is plagiarised.

Obvious plagiarism?

If I suspect a post contains plagiarism, the first thing I usually do is run it through an online plagiarism checker, such as smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker. These kinds of tools only find the most obvious plagiarism, so you will also want to try other methods, like manually searching on Google.

Don’t give up!

If the plagiarism finder can’t find anything, but I’m still suspicious, I try to Google a few lines from the post in quotation marks. By putting quotation marks around a sentence when Googling, it will look for exactly what you entered. This way, you'll more likely find what you're looking for compared to not using quotation marks.

Some are even lazier...

In some cases, I've also found the original post by reverse searching the image. You can do this by right-clicking on the image and selecting "Search Google for Image".

This will bring you to Google and if it can find any matching pages with that picture, you will see "Pages that include matching images" if you scroll down. I've seen a bunch plagiarisers who don't bother looking for another picture because they probably believe if they slightly reword the text, nobody will notice. Some don't know you can do a reverse image search.

“Google is your friend”

Another trick I've seen people use is translate a post in their own language to English (oftentimes using Google Translate), so if you know their native language (perhaps they've got a few posts in it) you can translate the post to it and check for plagiarism with the translated text. I recently came across a plagiariser that had both Bahasa and English posts and the Bahasa posts had been plagiarised and translated from English, while the English posts had been plagiarised and translated from Bahasa.

Hmm….

When someone joins the TWB discord we’re obviously curious to see their posts. A few times in the recent weeks there have been some suspicious people joining. But what made us suspicious? We compared their English when chatting to their posts and saw that they were very different.

Conclusion

If someone were to take something I’ve written and make money off of it, I would be very mad. Plagiarisers put in almost no effort in plagiarising and some even earn a bit from it. I would say that’s not far away from stealing from someone’s wallet.

Since Steem is a decentralized platform, I think everybody should look out and report plagiarism if they come across it. It’s a way to give back to the community.

If you’ve got any other tips on finding plagiarism, please let me know!

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