I Just Got a Medium Writer Banned from the Platform
I’ll do it again. I wish I’d done it earlier.
Yesterday, I got another Medium author kicked off the platform. It took less than four hours.
I’m still kind of proud of it, to be honest. I get a little smirk on my face whenever I remember it.
Let me back up and give a little context.
I’m a pretty prolific writer on Medium, and most of my stories are focused on the intersection of science, biology, and technology. Early on, I searched for the best publications to host my stories. Medium, at the time, was running Elemental, focused on health, but I didn’t want to simply sit around and wait for them to accept my submitted articles.
My solution? I created my own publication, Sharing Science.
(Interestingly, although I can change the title of the publication, I can’t change the URL, so you can still see the original title if you visit the link above!)
I mostly use my publication to host my own stories. I could do more to promote it, I’m sure. But it slowly gets more followers, and I get requests from other authors who want to add their own science articles. I am pretty happy to add new writers and I accept most submissions with a very light hand to editing, mostly to ensure that the style is somewhat consistent.
So yesterday, when I got an email from a Medium writer requesting that I add their story to Sharing Science, I happily clicked the draft link to give it a quick once-over.
And then my smile faded.
When your bullshit detector goes off, listen to it
Some authors are great at writing on Medium, with great use of quotes, headers, subheaders, and links to their sources. Some authors are newer to Medium, and it’s reflected in their writing and lack of styling.
But this article, shared with me, had great writing — but no formatting.
It had headers, on their own lines — but not formatted as headers, just as plain text.
It had quotes from scientific experts — but no links to the source.
And in a couple of places, the formatting was messed up. Some sentences touched others without a space. The sentences were well written. But the formatting was off.
All of this made me pause before adding this writer. On a whim, I copied a sentence out of their article and pasted it into Google, with quotes.
Google has a great feature where, if you put a phrase “in quotes”, it will search the Internet for that exact phrase. Think some phrase, or an entire article, is plagiarized? Paste a paragraph into Google and see if it exists, verbatim, on another site.
And sure enough, when I took a sentence from this Medium writer’s article and put it through this search, a hit came up.
A hit to another site, to an article written four years ago, written by someone with a very different name (not even the same gender!).
This Medium author had copy/pasted an entire article from another site and tried to pass it off as his own work.
No attribution. No link back to the original source. And the copy/paste explained why some of the formatting was off.
And things got worse from there.
You can’t call it a mistake if you keep doing it
I went back to this author’s profile. They had other stories published, more than half a dozen.
Guess what happened when I took a few sentences from each one and plugged it into a search engine?
Each story was plagiarized. They were stolen from different sources, different authors, on different topics, but none of them had any attribution. All of them had been ripped off of other Internet sites and posted fraudulently on Medium as stolen content.
It wasn’t enough for me to just reject this author. I’ve had my work pirated before, and I don’t like the feeling. I had to report this to Medium.
Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to do so.
Medium lets you report an author or a story (click on the three dots next to the top of the story, and select “Report”), but they have a separate link and form for plagiarism, stolen content. You can find it here:
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=165717#/201931128/200737695/
You provide the URL of the offending Medium post or article, the link to where the story or content exists out on the Internet, and your own contact information. Medium won’t share your contact information with the person you are reporting.
I reported two of this author’s stories using this form. Each time I submitted, I received an email, informing me that Medium had received the report and would investigate.
And Medium doesn’t mess around. About an hour and a half later, I received this email response to my ticket:
Boom. Account suspended, just like that.
And when I visit the writer’s profile page:
I feel like justice has been done.
Do we need to be the policemen of Medium?
I feel vindicated in getting this one plagiarizing account banned, but this doesn’t mean that the problem is solved. I’m sure there are plenty of other accounts on Medium that are doing this same thing, slipping under the radar while posting stolen content they claim as their own.
Of course, someone could post a story on multiple sites. You’re allowed to publish the same content on Medium and other sites, like NewsBreak. But you’d likely do so with the same, or at least a similar, name.
From here on out, I’m going to be more vigilant. I’m going to check each story submitted to my publication, to make sure it’s not plagiarized content.
If it’s one story, I might ask the writer whether the work is truly his.
If it’s a whole profile full of stories stolen from different sites and different people?
I’m reporting it. And I’m going to smile when I get that email from Medium telling me that the account has been banned.
Create your own content. Share your content.
You can respond to others. You can quote from others, but link to their original source.
Don’t try to pass off the work of others as your own.
Is it that hard?
Have you ever found stolen or plagiarized content on Medium? Let me know in the comments if this is something rare, or if you’ve also encountered it.