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After the whole saga with @TVOvermind ripping off one of our posts yesterday, I started poking around there and have yet to find a single post that links to any sources. Which is weird because they aggregate a lot of news.
I also have been trying really hard to find the writer of their version of our Hans Moleman piece, who has pumped out five other articles, over 4k words, no links in any of them, since yesterday.
Look, I can’t conclusively prove that this writer isn’t a real person, but I consider myself a pretty good googler and have found no proof that he actually exists yet
If I liked one of his articles and wanted to work with him, there'd be no way for me to find him. He only has other bylines on another site owned by the same company, and both have the same contact email. Who is this guy
@TVOvermind is Tom Foster a real person? How do I contact him?
How did I not notice this?! Thank you @MeRyanRoe. His byline calls him by name, but then suddenly in the description his name is "Wake"? What's going on here? 
While trying to untangle this mystery I found this 2013 post by @theanticritic abut leaving the site when it apparently turned into an SEO-grab farm moestes.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/enq…
Okay so his username on this site and the other one under this blog umbrella has led me to this website, with links to a bunch of Amazon books "Tom" wrote the-silver-pen.com/about/
This guy is very prolific! On top of the 4k+ words he wrote for TVOvermind since yesterday he's also written a handful of blog posts/short stories over the past 24 hours. the-silver-pen.com/author/wake977…
Prior to the Moleman fiasco, the @TVOvermind Twitter listed these two accounts. @ckinger13 said he hasn't been involved editorially in years but most people have referred me to @nathanielberman. Nat, why don't you link to sources and who is "Tom/Wake Foster"
The same day "Tom" ripped off (sorry, "rewrote because he loved the topic") another site's article and custom-made image he also wrote a blog post telling you to quit complaining about how life isn't fair
Thank you so much for the info! This only deepens the mystery and now I won’t be able to focus on anything else today
I have spoken with Tom. He is real. The conversation went as well as you might imagine.
The process, as I understand it, is @TVOvermind gives writers a link, or several links, about the thing they want written. Writers use those to prep a post. The published posts don't link to said links though. They just do away with all the work that made their posts possible.
Anyway, I guess the mystery is solved. Kind of? Tom isn't a fan, and he seems to maintain that his article didn't rip ours off, even though it used our image and clearly was based on a link to our post given to him by @TVOvermind (and they've since taken their post down)
If you like reading original, interesting stories by writers, remember to never give these SEO-driven content farms your clicks. Support the sites putting in the hard work and proper credit to other sites. And don't forget to #FuckFuckJerry okay Happy Friday!!!!
Writers for this site do NOT get paid in money, but "notoriety"
I wrote for free when I first started! But to be fair, there weren't 12+ ads all over the articles I wrote. So this site just rips off other sites' content with no credit for profit, and the writers churning all this out are doing it for free
I have 13 mutuals on Twitter who follow the @TVOvermind account. I don't think they'd support this though. @Variety @flavorwire @EW @DEADLINE @ComedyCentralPR @adultswimpr
Thank you to the former @TVOvermind writers/editors who have reached out to me privately about this. You're helping me paint this picture of the cool community of writers who got screwed when some ad company came in and turned your site into a SEO content factory.
So the site was sold to a company called BC Media Group in 2013, which is when the original writers started realizing it was slowly becoming a clicky content farm and began jumping ship. Here's a young/newer writer who contributed there more recently but figured out what was up:
The Moleman thing isn't really Tom's fault, it's just a rare case where @TVOvermind got caught for how they operate. Tom is just one of many writers - either young/new or just aspiring writers out there who view this as a good gig - who is following the orders given to him.
I don't think this site has a giant network of slimeballs who love to copy other people's work. It's just a bunch of people who like to write but maybe don't understand that this is wrong - doubly so since they're helping this site get away with it for free.
This writer also said the guy who runs the site uses "ghost writing accounts for various BC Media websites to plagiarize from his own writers if the cross-pollination of content makes sense for another website" so it's not crazy to have thought Tom was fake after all!
I bet if writers/editors at other sites took a gander around that site, it wouldn't take long for them to find an article or scoop of theirs regurgitated there without credit. Doesn't seem like a stretch, now that we know how they assign stories.
Oh man. Here's another article Tom ripped off from @Brian_Cronin. Using the same image as the original again, this time from @CBR. This is really bad.
Here’s another one @sirstefan found ripping off an @ELLEmagazine article by @starrbowenbank. Same deal.
Just yesterday, @TVOvermind said the Hans Moleman piece was their bad, basically, and that this had NEVER happened before.
It's safe to say, based on the results of some very casual searching, that there are tons more examples like this. @nathanielberman and @TVOvermind have some explaining to do.
Oh hey look they also stole a piece @Ceilidhann wrote for @screenrant. Used their image too.
Well if you write or edit for @CBR I highly recommend you sift through @TVOvermind because they have stolen a LOT of your content. @Brian_Cronin you should send these guys an invoice!
Here's a @bcbeat piece by @eleanordowling they stole. They even stole the graphs in the piece - without credit to the original, of course.
And in case you missed it, here's the Hans Moleman piece they stole from Vulture. Hans Moleman wasn't making news headlines or anything, lol. And they used our custom image for it too. They took it down after I started tweeting about it.
This is way more evidence than I need, personally. @TVOvermind is essentially just a content plagiarism farm and it's INSANE to me that they have writers willing to churn this out FOR FREE. If you write for this site, please stop. There are better gigs out there.
I'd like an explanation for this, @TVOvermind, because yesterday you said this never happens, and yet here we are 24 hours later with a pile of evidence to the contrary.
It's stuff like this that contributes to people feeling bad about calling places out for stealing their stuff. Yesterday feels like forever ago already
And I try to take everyone at their word and assume the best in people. Maybe a dumb idea, but I do! I want to keep it positive. But this was a lie.
Here's what @TVOvermind could do to start making it right:
- address this, admit to it, and apologize
- remove all of their stolen articles
- start fresh with original content/links to sources
- pay their writers
What all the sites they stole from want is another issue.
- address this, admit to it, and apologize
- remove all of their stolen articles
- start fresh with original content/links to sources
- pay their writers
What all the sites they stole from want is another issue.
My sympathy for the writers still there has kind of faded. If you help @TVOvermind make money by ripping off other writers' work for free, you should know that is very bad, and you should walk away.
I'll take a break for now and give @TVOvermind the opportunity to explain themselves. Your move guys.
I appreciate the apology, but respectfully, it's not my responsibility to go through your archives and find every article that you've stolen from. And it appears to be most of them anyway. I also want to respond to a few of your points here.
Here's the clarification I can give you: None of your articles cite/link to any sources, and the majority of them appear to be thinly-veiled plagiarism of other articles. And I doubt you are using images properly, considering you stole one for our piece.
Take a closer look at that "10 Things You Didn't Know" piece I singled out, then start comparing the ones you published with the links you gave the writers for them. Calling those 100% original work is a big stretch.
You don't though. Custom-made images by Vulture and @screenrant were used without permission as well as graphs for a piece published by @bcbeat. I'm sure there's more. Working hard is what the writers on the originals are doing, you just rip them off.
We don't agree on what qualifies as "original content"? I'm shocked.
Look, I get it. Writers weren't giving you the traffic you needed so you turned the site into an SEO grab. You got away with it for a long time. It's tough for me to believe you don't understand the concepts of crediting sources and that plagiarism is bad.
It's @nathanielberman and he also reached out to me from that account, but most of the tweets have come from @TVOvermind so that's what I'm responding to
I'm glad you're trying to make this right and hope you do! But that doesn't erase how long you got away with this. Editors, writers, and readers have a right to be angry. Would this have ever been addressed if I hadn't started tweeting about it? Doubtful.
Tom's blog has a new post calling the gender gap BS and calling Black Lives Matter "Being Lazy Matters." This is the kind of stuff he writes when he isn't ripping off posts by other sites.
Quick shoutout to Hans Moleman. Without this cute little guy I would've never fallen down this crazy rabbit hole. You made this happen, Hans.
Hi Tom. It's not a "personal attack" to post screenshots from a publicly available blog post.
None of this is personal. I found a plagiarized article, then people started pointing out to me that there were many others. It's not a "single weakness," it's a consistent pattern of ripping off hardworking people.
Well then!
I definitely did not expect to dig into a story about rampant plagiarism only to get a diatribe about why some guy is definitely not racist in return, but okay.
Even though @TVOvermind admitted to all this and removed the Moleman piece, Tom insists he's the true victim here. I'm going to move on from interacting with him because he's in total denial and also because @TVOvermind is ultimately responsible for this.
They're still publishing this stuff too. It's so easy to trace back to the original.
This one's also still up, they just swapped in another photo so it doesn't look as obvious.
Switching up the photo/headline and maybe reordering how facts come in a piece might make it harder to get screenshots that show how obvious this theft is, but that doesn't change that it's theft.
wow Pablo this is beautiful thank you
Yeah - whether they stole this news from a site or not, what ultimately matters is that they don't credit the person on Twitter who came up with the theory, which all the other news sources credit.
Seems like the more reasonable approach would be to stop publishing until you have the bandwidth to oversee your own site, and if writers who have plagiarized were not explicitly told to do so, you definitely shouldn't continue publishing work by them.
See, this goes back years. Here's a @screenrant roundup from 2017 where they didn't even bother to reorder the items.
If they put in some effort to make things right, that's great, but I still don't think readers or writers should support sites like this. It's just so scummy and exploitative on so many levels and @Google shouldn't let this kind of thing show up in results.
I don't want to be a broken record here, but @CBR, you should really look into this site. They've taken tons of your posts. cc @samstoneshow
The guy who runs the site has deleted his Twitter account, it appears.
and Tom's written another blog post about "tearing others down" and what "woke" means
Uncoached Corp, the umbrella that @TVOvermind and similar sites operate under, says it "respects others’ intellectual property rights and has made every effort to secure appropriate clearances for all proprietary intellectual properties and require our users to do the same."
😑 h/t @QVHough
He wrote this for @moneyinccom, another one of the sites in this network
They are claiming this piece is original, but it's clearly just lifted from @ELLEmagazine's piece by @starrbowenbank.
The facts in the roundup are even in the same order. I mean, come on. And @starrbowenbank links to all her sources.
Again, swapping in another photo and tweaking the headline doesn't change the fact that this was stolen from another website. How can you possibly think this is acceptable?
This post they tweeted out an hour ago is all taken from a @monstersandcrit piece by @AprilMac
Nat also plagiarizes other sites' work himself. Here's a post he wrote and published two hours ago at the other site he runs, @moneyinccom, which rips off a post from @themotleyfool.
Here are the three reasons in the @themotleyfool piece.
And here are the reasons in the @moneyinccom ripoff.
this tweet is not aging well
And they have a sponsored post up on the homepage by @MazdaUSA fyi.
Here's another piece he published that is just a condensed version of a @businessinsider roundup by @David_Slotnick.
So despite people starting to catch on to all this, he's continued to publish stolen work on these sites. The writers steal work, he steals work, no one's being honest, Nat deleted his Twitter, and I can't stop thinking about this!!!
Helpful tip! Thank you.
This whole saga has inspired Tom to start writing a new story
Hey @screenrant, you're in the same boat as @CBR. Looks like @TVOvermind rips off lots of your posts.
Imagine being the @screenrant writer who discovers that not only did a writer steal your work and rewrite your piece on another site with no credit, but @googlenews ranks the ripoff post first.
whoops wrong tweet - here are the @googlenews results
Links are now starting to show up in posts. This one published today has one link to Sasha's Instagram in the first sentence, but all the facts are from this @seventeen roundup by @MeganLasher.
Here's the first post I've come across that actually credits the source it's gathering all its information from by name
I still don't understand why the authors that have plagiarized multiple articles are still being assigned pieces.
I get it - similar articles happen. But there's a clear pattern of stolen articles on your site, and until today it never cited any sources, so if I see something like this with lots of info but no sources, I'm going to assume it's part of that pattern.
Tom has written a new blog post about plagiarism and "mob rule" taking down writers who aren't guilty of plagiarism but just "made a mistake"
Did the site instruct writers to plagiarize, or did they do that independently? There was never any pushback? Never was flagged as a problem? Who takes responsibility for that? Why are they still getting assignments?
So what happened with the Hans Moleman piece? Hans Moleman was not in the news and there weren't multiple articles. Was the writer given our piece and essentially told "hey, rewrite this article"?
Former writers told me they're given links to the pieces they're assigned to write, and Moleman, like all the stolen articles, was first published within two weeks of the @TVOvermind ripoff. "Rewritten without attribution" = plagiarism.
No, one of them wrote there last year. And I really don't care who is paid, what I'm concerned about is all the plagiarism.
I mean, I'm not surprised we disagree on what plagiarism is. The fact that the writers who do this are still getting assignments makes that clear. But you did take down the Moleman piece after @sirstefan and I found it.
So you agree Moleman was "rewritten without attribution"? Because that's what plagiarism is.
Can you just answer the question?
So I'll take this to mean you're not going to answer.
It's not a debate and I think you realize that.
So you're like a FuckJerry for entertainment journalism.
You're refusing to acknowledge a long pattern of content theft, you're saying you'd happily give credit when original creators ask for it, and you remove posts when people complain. That's straight out of the FuckJerry playbook.
You could answer the question, but it's clear you're not going to, because you don't want to be 100% honest about how your site operates.
And the reason you've "never had issue with other sites, ever," @TVOvermind, is because any legit writer would see this from a quick glance. This just happens to be the first time someone bothered to point it all out.
Here's what any respectable site does when they see an article on another site they like/want on their site. In this case, @TheAVClub. This is an extremely basic and obvious concept: news.avclub.com/the-simpsons-a…
I’m sure there are lots more examples. And you never cite sources in your many news posts either, which should also be fixed going forward.
So @TVOvermind isn't going to outright admit to plagiarism, but it seems that they realize what they've been doing for a long time is wrong. The fact that the offending writers still contribute there means what they did was enabled. Maybe even encouraged? Who knows.
They're also the FuckJerry of finance journalism. They've stolen from @businessinsider and others on their other site @moneyinccom. Here's a post that went up a half hour ago stolen from @ExpertiseHQ with no credit.
And it's not just Tom. This is by a different writer. This is happening all the time on all the sites. It's by design.
You shouldn't be publishing these posts to begin with! Why is this so hard to understand?
This is your business model and until that changes completely you need to stop publishing new posts, period.
I'd be more concerned right now about whether or not the sites you've stolen lots of content from, like @CBR and @screenrant, decide to take any action.
You've published stolen content without credit within the past hour. I can't believe we're still having this conversation. Your business is built on other people's work.
Good. That is a great first step. Now I have become an unpaid crisis advisor to content plagiarism farms. What is even happening
I feel like it's worth emphasizing this excerpt from that piece Nat wrote for @moneyinccom again, because maybe this approach makes sense for a former recruiter in the finance industry, but it doesn't quite translate to original and high-quality writing/reporting
More content from @CBR:
It feels pointless to keep going because it's incredibly easy to keep finding more and I don't think anyone aside from @TVOvermind needs convincing. And to say they'll remove the stolen posts is silly because really what they should do is remove the website. Everything is stolen.
I do really hope @googlenews (@searchliaison!!!) and @IMDb take a look and stop giving these guys clicks and letting them rank high on search results that belong to the sites putting in the hard work on the original pieces. This is such bullshit and should not be rewarded.
That should include tvovermind.com, moneyinc.com, uncoached.com, and any other content thieves operating under this umbrella.
And if you're a writer who dismissed #FuckFuckJerry because it seemed really silly and trivial and like a big explosion over nothing important but find what @TVOvermind is doing to be messed up, welcome. It's the same thing and it sucks for everyone.
Well turns out this wasn't true. New posts keep going up.
I am not a therapist, and to be honest, you're making me extremely uncomfortable right now. If you're having thoughts of self-harm, please go talk to someone and get professional help. I just want your sites to stop publishing plagiarized content.
Get offline, stop publishing on the sites, take a break, get some help from your friends or family or professionals, and then start working on something that doesn't operate this way. Having said that, don't try to emotionally manipulate me like this. This is about plagiarism.
(To the people who have reached out to me privately about this, thank you so much. It was needed and extremely appreciated.)
In other news, Tom has posted part 2 of his story inspired by all this. Since he knows I'm watching, he also found a creative way to let me know what he thinks of me.
Another blog under this same umbrella, @Kittentoob, seems to take most of its content from @catster.
More from @catster
More from @catster again (Who could've guessed this thread would take a turn towards cat butts and farts?!)
TVOvermind has published 7 new articles so far today, and Money Inc has published 6. Nothing new from Uncoached or Kittentoob yet today (not sure how many blogs this company operates)
Thanks to the tipster who let me know @unrealitymag is another one of the blogs. Same deal there, it appears. Here's more taken from @Brian_Cronin at @CBR
For @pajiba, @theredmond has written a piece in response to all this about getting a job offer by Nat but turning it down after he saw a bunch of red flags: pajiba.com/trade_news/nat…
They are STILL PUBLISHING new articles. Still! As of ten minutes ago!
Okay, yes, this is funny, but also, this is essentially Tom threatening me. With violence. Limp Bizkit-style. So I figured I'd get it on the record even though it's silly because I've already received several threats over this.
One of the most depressing parts of digging into all this has been hearing from the writers and editors who contributed before, or as, it turned into such a shameless plagiarism machine. This is some helpful insight from one of them:
I guess they're just going to....keep publishing? And start adding links in? But they haven't tweeted in a while so I guess we'll see what happens over the next few days.
The short story continues. It gives an interesting insight into the lack of willingness to just face this for what it is - plagiarism - and also the apparent lack of sincerity from the site. All true events here except for some reason the characters are women instead of men
sigh
New post. Same 5 beaches and in the exact same order as this @vivatropical roundup that's a top Google result. Interestingly, are some links to other related articles throughout the piece but none are articles that have these exact 5 picks in this order. Maybe a coincidence.
Wait, what? According to the byline, this person is maybe a minor? It says he's "not even in college yet." And he's a managing editor there. That's a little troubling.
Why would you put minors on the front lines like this when you know you're being scrutinized for ripping off other sites? 😬
I think you're right. Yikes.
Here's a video Nat made in 2017 called "How I Write Over 30 Articles a Day" that doesn't mention the fact that most of the articles are just rewrites of other articles
Here's another one (these are for the Money Inc YouTube channel): "Do what other people can't or aren't willing to do ... Bottom line is, if I can do it, you probably can't."
Remember how we found @Kittentoob, which takes ideas from @catster? There's also @Puppytoob, which takes ideas from @dogster:
Here's a very interesting @Gizmodo piece that got the Hans Moleman ripoff treatment at @moneyinccom:
Here's how these pieces get "rewritten because they loved the topic"
Hello @thepointsguy, your content was also "rewritten" with no credit or links. And @Google gives them a nice cushy #2 spot on search too.
Update: There are more! I'll stop at this one for @futurism since this would probably go on forever but here's one more by @DanRobitzski
...and here's the @moneyinccom ripoff.
I feel like I'm screaming into a void here, but it's kind of enjoyable finding these
