Reddit was taken by storm recently when a pair of Australian YouTubers accused BuzzFeed of stealing their content.
It was a video that the Rose Sisters had made a few months ago titled “We Became Royal Princesses For a day”, that they claim the BuzzFeed video series “LadyLike” had stolen from. They released this video on 22nd of June 2018.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdLUAF4Xx2g&w=560&h=315]
The BuzzFeed’s LadyLike video is titled `’We Follow Princess Rules For a Day”. Their video was released 5th October 2018.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzVWLxZNMmw&w=560&h=315]
It is hard to deny that the videos do share quite a lot of similarities, like Biannca Rose of the Rose Sisters points out in her video titled “BUZZFEED CAUGHT STEALING AGAIN”.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGtUULD8U6o&w=560&h=315]
She accuses BuzzFeed of stealing the general concept of the video – which is to follow the rules of a princess for a day. But she also accuses them of even stealing aspects of their script, saying that they copied “rules” that they included in their video that aren’t actually official royal rules. The video compares the whole length of both videos, pointing out all similarities throughout.
The Voice of London reached out to BuzzFeed for comment, and a BuzzFeed spokesperson said: “We don’t plan to take down the video, which was inspired by two similar BuzzFeed pieces that were created and posted before the Rose Sisters’ post.”
These are the two posts that they linked too.
Although these two pieces of content are on the subject of Meghan Markle, who is now a royal, they don’t exactly make it obvious how their video and the Rose Sisters’ video ended up being so similar.
It would be much easier to give them the benefit of the doubt, because sometimes these things happen, if they hadn’t been accused of ripping content before. See this in-depth analysis from Slate, claiming that BuzzFeed re-hash a big portion of their content from Reddit and other online sources.
The users commenting on the Reddit thread that called BuzzFeed out seemed to unanimously condemn them for their actions. The thread got gilded and received over 60 thousand upvotes
There have been other YouTubers in the past that have accused BuzzFeed of stealing ideas, Jaclyn Glenn being one of them and Akilah Hughes being another.
Two BuzzFeed video producers, Sara and Kelsey, did respond to Jaclyn’s claims of plagiarism in a fleshed-out post on medium.com, claiming them to be unfounded.
* The Voice of London is still awaiting comment from the Rose Sisters. *
Words: Adam Kirkman | Subbing: Salvi Shahlaie