Plagiarism is good
Academics are evaluated in terms of their publication count and citations because it correlates with producing large amounts of useful work. They could try to fake doing this is by repeatedly publishing other people’s work. To prevent people from doing this, norms against plagiarism were enforced. In a similar vein, copying and selling art that others have done was made illegal to allow people to profit from their work. Rules against plagiarism in academia and violating copyright law are probably for the best, though the duration of copyright/patents should be shortened to a smaller timeframe, ideally 10-30 years.
Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with taking something on the internet and posting it as if it were your work.
Consider somebody who does literally nothing but copy other people’s blog posts and tweets word for word. If they post good ideas and get traction, people will eventually catch on to what they are doing and start following the people they are copying. Even in a society where plagiarism were accepted, they would serve no purpose and their popularity would always pale in comparison to their sources because they are intellectually downstream.
Often, internet plagiarism isn’t like that. People take base content (e.g. articles, memes, phrases) that other accounts post, change them a little, and then post them as if they discovered them. It’s not uncommon for the copies to supersede the originals in terms of exposure. One must ask then why: sometimes the account that copied had a larger following, sometimes small alterations that the copycat made increased virality, and sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw.
None of these advantages are significant enough to warrant enforcing rules. If some accounts are able to make copied content go more viral because of their following, then that begs the question as to why some people have larger followings in the first place. If the alterations to the content are the reason for enhanced virality, then it’s not actually plagiarism and constitutes different content in its own right.
It’s also impossible to implement anti-plagiarism rules on the internet. If there are rules against copying content, and copying content works, then the defectors and rule breakers will be rewarded because random people on the internet cannot be held responsible for what they do. If there are no rules, and copying content is effective, then everybody will plagiarise…
Actually, they wont. If too many people are recycling content, then people who post “original” and upstream content will be rewarded as it is more scarce. There is no need for kvetching about people “stealing” content or “appropriating” culture. That’s literally what everything is. Originality is a matter of degree, not dichotomy.
Conventional wisdom in marketing holds that 80% of product spread is due to word-of-mouth. Sometimes luck strikes for individual works of art, but in the long run the best rises to the top. It’s more true for some things than others; the tendency is strongest in sports, followed by math, religions, businesses, games, painting, philosophy, movies, music, and literature. With the exception of fashion and maybe politics, the best rising to the top is inevitable.
People love to say that Minecraft aped Dwarf Fortress or that Inception aped Paprika, but at the end of the day, Minecraft and Inception were more popular than their predecessors because they were different, not because they were the same.
Further reading:
This article doesn’t really explain why academic norms against it are fine, but blogging / social media ones aren’t. It seems the incentive structure, and therefore the reasons, are essentially the same.
The problem all lies with incentives, and aligning them with the public good. You could spend a week compiling original data and making a graph, or you could spend a week re-posting 200 other people’s such work. You note that there is some natural equilibrium and so we’ll never totally lose original content — true, but what if that equilibrium is far below the optimal equilibrium? If we imagine a world where social networks are mandated to use AI to strike down every image that’s not either original, with significant alterations, or at least giving full attribution — that is a world with more original content, and therefore discoveries, being generated, as original creators would have less competition to be heard, and be more fully rewarded.
More practically, educated people have social norms against ripping off work without attribution — and those seem good and useful.
The dumbest accusation is “self plagiarism,” when someone takes passages from their own work and uses them in a later work. That should be standard for Methods sections in academic articles.