News plagiarism sites run real stories through thesaurus to avoid detection, to hilarious effect

Jesselyn Cook noticed that a site called NewsBuzzr had ripped off one of her stories at Huffington Post. It turned out to be some kind of awful plagiarism bot that uses a thesaurus to avoid detection as duplicate content, resulting in hilariously mangled prose. Cook calls it "truly excellent Florida Male content" and I hope that term sticks.

The intro to my story, which describes a woman feeling an urgent tap on her shoulder, had been changed to say that she felt a pressing faucet instead. The term sex videos had become intercourse movies, and the quote I was definitely shocked had morphed into this nonsense: I used to be indisputably surprised. The entire piece had been altered, seemingly word-by-word, rendering some sentences far less coherent than others.

Humor aside, the scale of the scam is such that it makes real money, which it is ultimately depriving its victims of. There was a point about a decade ago where the number of sites scraping Boing Boing became uncountable, but sadly none of them turned our hard-driving coverage into magnetic storage delineations.

The screengrab above is from the NewsBuzzr-world's own science educator, "Invoice Nye the Science Man." Google has already banned NewsBuzzr from AdSense. Read the rest