How AI Can Help Win The War Against Piracy Despite Social Media

As the world of media and entertainment consumption gravitates more and more towards digital channels, it often seems hopeless to be thinking about winning the war against piracy. Piracy sites pop up all the time and to top it off, social media is now a preferred source of piracy content.

It makes sense. After all, content consumption is social in nature. We crave entertainment not solely for its enjoyment, but because we love to socialize about it. FOMO (fear-of-missing-out) compels us to be on top of the latest and greatest movie, news, or sports event. Therefore, naturally, it was only a matter of time before piracy would shift significantly to social media sites.

How serious is the problem? How can AI help solve it? Let’s explore these two questions.

The Magnitude of the Problem

I have been tracking the social media piracy problem for a few years now, and most recently in a research project with Mike Smith from Carnegie Mellon and Yixin Lu from George Washington University, in partnership with VFT Solutions, which has shared data on social media piracy for numerous entertainment and sports events.

In a nutshell, piracy in social media is quite pervasive. As an example, VFT Solutions monitored the Fury vs. Ngannou professional cross-over heavyweight boxing match, recording more than 21 million views on a sample of live piracy streams across social media platforms and web-based piracy sites that have live chat functions to communicate with viewers. That’s a bigger blow for viewership and revenues than any one that the boxers received inside the ring. Wayne Lonstein, co-founder and CEO of VFT, states: “We estimate that about 40-60% of social piracy views are unique, depending on whether the streams are being taken down or not.”

Millions of views were also recorded for the 2023 Super Bowl and for the 2022 FIFA World Cup last summer, across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and TikTok. And if you thought only live events are affected by social media piracy, tracking of Top Gun: Maverick upon its digital release revealed almost 10 million views across 449 piracy streams. Lu states: “Given how easily and quickly content is shared on social media platforms, these numbers may only be the tip of the iceberg.”

Some content providers try to relieve the impact of social media on the bottom line by suggesting that not many of the pirate viewers would be willing to pay for the content, they are just exploiting the availability of the free content. However, VFT performed experiments with our scientific guidance, and the preliminary findings suggest there is plenty of potential to reduce piracy through deterrence and education. VFT used its patented process to insert messages in piracy streams indicating that the content is illegal or highlighting the losses incurred by artists and athletes. Within minutes after these message insertions, 60% of the streams saw either a 10% or higher drop in viewership or the stream itself was dropped. These findings suggest there’s hope not just by deterring and educating pirate viewers but also pirate streamers who may not be fully aware of the illegal nature of this activity and its consequences. Google, Meta, Amazon.

The Solution: Artificial and Human Intelligence

You would wonder if the big tech companies that own these platforms, including Google, Meta, and Amazon, have an interest in fighting social media piracy, and if so, why it is so rampant. I think it’s a matter of incentives. Social media platforms profit from user traffic and engagement, so curbing piracy to its demise goes against this incentive. From my observation over the years, it’s not that they haven’t tried, but I think they can try harder if the right incentives are put in place (from policy makers and regulators? from content providers?).

Once the incentives in social media companies are fully aligned to fight piracy, they can fully leverage advances in the power of AI to find and take down the pirate streams. Nevertheless, it is a cat and mouse problem, because as new AI techniques arise to identify pirate streams of copyrighted content, pirates figure out ways to make the content elusive to these techniques, and they get better at playing the whack-a-mole game where pirate streams pop up as others are taken down. But one thing is clear to me: without both human and artificial intelligence aligned to fight social media piracy, I am more hopeless than hopeful.