Hello, I'm a new bot standing against plagiarism on Steemit

^{Made with Canva}

Steemit.com is an revolutionary blogging platform that rewards authors and curators for just posting content, discussing and favouriting them. This easy way of making money is attracting users who start abusing the system: spams, scams, plagiarism, multiple fake (upvoting) accounts etc... If let out of control, these people will start hurting the system, their impact is not only the reserve ration as @duplibot says in its intro post but they also pick from the reward pool which means legitimate author will get lesser payouts.

Who is Defakator

I'm a bot who wants to give a hand to other bots such as @cheetah (and @steemcleaners), @submarine, @grumpycat or @duplibot. I want to start flagging primarily posts that use photos from other authors without crediting them, especially ones use in a #photography #contest. On a secondary objective, I will be also flagging fake accounts. As time goes by, my purpose on Steemit will probably change, but the idea is the same, help legitimate authors and help making Steemit a better place for all of us.

My name Defakator is a combination of "defecate", "fake" and "terminator" lol. My current avatar photo has also been created with Canva, until I manage to create my own icon or someone offers me one ;-)

How does it work?

Detecting text plagiarism or repetitive similar comments have their own challenges. Detecting image plagiarisms is another challenge. There are services out there such as https://tineye.com where you can search by images but all API available for developers to create services such as myself are not free. My system uses the free-tier of Vision API from Google Cloud Platform, which means I'm limited in the number of request I can make per month. But because I cannot be fully automated, this should be enough for now.

Here is how I work:

• a NodeJS script using SteemJS library is fetching from various popular tags and extract images from the posts.
• each extracted images are ran through Google's WebDetection API to identify similar images and pages containing those images
• a report file is then reported for each suspicious posts for manual review
• upon review, I will post a comment on the post with a screenshot of the post itself, a summary of what has been analysed and the result of the WebDetection call

Challenges

Here are challenges that prevent me from being fully automated:

• the current API regularly surface very similar but not identical images
• legitimate re-use of existing images (logo or banner for a group for example)
• meme posts (dmania posts for example)
• use of images in contest reports
• images in the trending/hot section that have been there for a while and present in the many Steemit clone sites
• photographs of a building taken at different point in time but in the same angle. Say for example a photographer taking the photo of a building just to show how the building and its surrounding has changed compared to 50 years ago.
• legitimate use of photos from free images libraries or stock photography sites
• the photo is actually really owned by the author of the post but I failed to recognised it. Very sorry when that happens, I'm doing my best to avoid false-positives, but I'm also not pointing fingers at you, just raising awareness that a similar or same image can be found somewhere else. I will have a whitelist soon for "good" authors :-D

To help with the manual work, the script uses some blacklists for example, I will exclude a post if the image is recognised as "Bitcoin" or "illustration" from the web entity list returned by the Web Detection API.

I'm still young

I'm still very beta at the moment, but I'm trying my best to get better and will regularly check for plagiarisms on the platform. I'm only at 15SP with a reputation of 25, so I can't do much against down votes. One plagiarist has down-voted my post, he had enough SP to make it hidden. Being still young on Steemit,

If you feel I'm right doing what I'm doing, please help me build my SP and raise my reputation by upvoting my posts and comments or by delegating SP or donating some SBD/STEEM. Another way of contributing is to verify my comments are accurate and down-voting the plagiarising posts to help the community.

Early results

From my early comments on suspicious posts, I've received different responses from their authors:

• some of them just ignore the comment
• some say "Thank you" and do nothing (example)
• some say "Thank you" and add the source to their post or delete/replace the images (this is why a screenshot was later on introduced) (example)
• some edited their post and deleted all content (example)
• some start following me
• some might have muted me
• some down-voted me (example)

I also noticed some users agreeing with my comment and up-voting them. Thank you guys.

Here is a list of people who follow, unfollow and mute me:
https://steem.makerwannabe.com/@defakator/followers

If you are interested in which post I've recently commented on or what people reply to me, head here:
https://steemd.com/@defakator

Shoutout to my first supporter:

Thank you @enmy for writing about me: Bot en Steemit, Amados por unos, Odiados por Otros - Idea Interesante: BOT BILINGÜE. Unfortunately, bilingual plagiarism bots are very hard to build. That means the script needs to actually understand what the post is all about and then also understand what all the existing websites are all about in order to be able to compare them. Just translating is not enough because translating an original text from english to spanish and then back to english will give a different text.

Feedback and support

What do everyone think of my work? Should I continue or should I stop? Should I do things differently?

Personally I think my comments are a bit too long and "in your face". So I was thinking I could use a kind of badge or banner and redirect users to a website where I show the full report on the post. This will make false-positive a bit less painful.

Please let me know what you think about me. I will also appreciate some help to increase SP and reputation.