It's not manufactured controversy, the biggest accounts who are successful from these aggregation without permission practices are constantly under criticism from the creators whose work they are profiting off. If you think this is "manufactured" google "Fat Jew" or "Fuckjerry" those are 2 Instagram accounts that creators led unfollow protests against because they profit from other's content.

There's a ton of criticism of these practices, it's morally grey at best, I believe it's morally wrong.

It's not hard to see why this upsets creators. There are thousands of actual content creators, artists, comedians, writers, etc working on social media to make a name for themselves and develop a following (or maintain a following, some of the people aggregators steal from are very successful). These people do the hard work of making original content that is interesting. They suffer failure, they launch new projects and ideas and do a ton of hard work. Then the aggregator accounts skim off the top of the entire network, don't pay the creators and end up with thousands to millions in ad money without doing any of the original & difficult creative work. Rip off at scale is far more lucrative than doing the hard work of making original material.

But the lower effort rip off at scale is only possible profiting off of people doing hard work for free.

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