The Verge – “Being original on Facebook doesn’t pay, according to its own data. The conventional wisdom around the “widely viewed content report” that Facebook released last week is that it obscured more than it revealed. The company’s effort to demonstrate that most users do not regularly see divisive news stories in their feeds received widespread criticism for offering only the highest-level view of the data possible. The most-shared domain on Facebook is YouTube.com? Great, thanks. But in recent days, I’ve spent more time looking at the data Facebook actually did share. And while it’s true that it tells us little about hot-button issues like the spread of COVID-19 misinformation or the rise of vaccine hesitancy, the report arguably reveals something just as damning: almost all of the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter were effectively plagiarized from elsewhere. And some of the same audience-building tactics that allowed Russian interference to flourish on the platform in 2016 continue to be effective. Today, I want to look at two aspects of the data. First, we’ll look at the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter to see where they originally came from. Second, we’ll look at one of the most popular links on the platform, which may be running a grift on US military veterans…”