To improve content quality and encourage original content, WeChat announced punishment rules last week for plagiarism on WeChat official account platform.
Content plagiarism is very common on China Internet; it’s not surprising to see duplicate content across many WeChat official accounts.
According to WeChat team, WeChat official accounts will receive a warning along with corresponding content deletion if plagiarism is identified and reported by the copyright owner for the first time. The account will be suspended for 7 days for the second time, 15 days for the third time, 30 days for the fourth time. WeChat official account will be permanently suspended for the fifth time.
WeChat recently launched an “original content declaration” feature for official accounts platform. Once used, WeChat will tag the corresponding published content as “original”. If other accounts publish the same article, the source will automatically show the source and send alerts to the copyright owner. This feature will be disabled if the declared original content is later found to be owned by someone else.
In fact, many WeChat accounts will not report it as long as the accounts “using” their content do specify the source.
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