Youtube star, Hank Green recently accused Facebook of using unethical ways of boosting up views on videos posted in the site.
Green is one of the founders of the Youtube channel, VlogBrothers, which has over 2.6 million channel subscribers, dubbed as "Nerdfighters." Hank Green and his brother, John Green (yes, the author) started the channel back in 2007.
In a blog post dated Aug. 3, Hank Green accused Facebook of "lying, cheating and stealing" after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that it has now more video views and reach than other video-hosting websites like Youtube.
In the blog post, Green points out where Facebook deceives its audience. According to him, Facebook counts videos as "viewed" only after three seconds - a very short period of time compared to Youtube, wherein a video is only counted as "viewed" after 30 seconds.
Green also pointed out that Facebook is cheating by manipulating the audience reach of videos from Youtube and Vine.
"If I embed a YouTube video or Vine on Facebook, only a tiny fraction of my audience will actually see it," Green alleged. "But if I post the same video natively on Facebook, suddenly it's in everyone's feed everywhere!"
Hank Green also accused Facebook of "stealing" or "Freebooting" copyrighted videos from Youtube in order to gain more video views. Unlike Youtube, which has strict prohibitions in re-uploading copyrighted material, Facebook only takes down videos if someone reports it.
"We shouldn't be surprised when they rip it (videos) off YouTube and upload it natively. Facebook's algorithms encourage this theft," Green said.
"What is Facebook doing about it?" He added. "They'll take the video down a couple days after you let them know. Y'know, once it's received 99.9% of the views it will ever receive."
Green added that creators have been complaining about Facebook's unethical tactics to rake in video views for a very long time but to no avail.
