My writing was plagiarized basically word-for-word (*Updated 3 days later — with an amicable ending)
I just think… this sucks (but then it didn’t as much)
It’s not the first time my writing has been plagiarized, for I have seen my more viral articles end up reposted on other websites without any proper credit assigned to me. The ease of copy and paste is the major downside of the Internet, and these sites know that no one would really take the time to litigate and sue for plagiarized writing.
Although it’s both saddening and disappointing to see my work so easily stolen, I try to let these instances go, for I know that writers and content creators like this seldom ever really get anywhere for taking shortcuts. But this time, I found myself particularly shocked, for three key reasons:
- The plagiarized piece is posted on Medium. And if you use the search function on Medium to search the key words in the title, the plagiarized version comes up first — and mine comes up never. How did that happen?
- It is published in a well-established publication with thousands of followers.
- The writer has about 1000 followers, and so can be earning money off work that I wrote.
Is he plagiarizing off of other people as well? Probably — I don’t see why I would be special — but I didn’t have the heart to check.
What to do?
My first thought was to reach out to the writer, but then would the post just get deleted and would the writer suffer no more consequences? Would he continue to steal writing?
Then I thought to report the story to Medium, but maybe they would just delete the story as well. Or maybe they would delete and ban the account, but did I want the conversation to just end there?
Third, I thought about releasing the name and story here, so current followers and partnering publications may notice. Especially the latter, that maybe they are in need of a stronger curation and vetting process — a good opportunity for all of us to think about the quality of information we find online. But I am wary of cancel culture and online harassment, and don’t want more attention on the plagiarizer than need be.
The Internet is a hard place to navigate. What to do?
Update 3 days later
I ended up reaching out to Medium support, and they promptly suspended the account. I thought that was the end of it.
But I later received an email from the person who copied my writing (reposted here with their permission):
After this message we went back and forth a bit, and I feel really... at peace. I encouraged them to continue their work, because I honestly would like to see them thrive as a writer — but just with their own words.
Ah! Life is a learning experience.
You can never tell on the Internet what kind of person is on the other end, but it was nice to find out that they were human, reasonable, and had no ill intent. While still holding them accountable, I can understand how the cloak of anonymity can allow for perfectly normal people to become tempted by things they otherwise never would’ve done in person.
Forgive and grow together. I think this was the solution I was hoping for.
— Kaki
