01.02.2026
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News organisations battle widespread content misuse online

7 mins



  • Journalists warn that online content reuse without credit is hurting credible newsrooms.

New media technology has revolutionised journalism by expanding news platforms and audience reach. However, the lack of clear and stable regulation around content ownership has created serious challenges.

This has resulted in social media accounts presenting themselves as news sites, despite not producing original content and instead relying heavily on material from legitimate news organisations.

Journalists say this practice undermines journalistic integrity and ethics. At the same time, digital platforms allow audiences to access a wide range of content anytime and anywhere.

SABC News alone is available across multiple digital platforms and as a public broadcaster they are obligated to share service news content in all languages and platforms for a wider reach.

“I would say we encourage our audience to share our content, to repost our content. We share our content as widely as we possibly can. On occasion, we even share our content with our competitors. This means that the message that we have to share gets to more people, which is of course what we want,” says SABC Digital News Editor, Aasra Bramdeo.

Sharing interesting news items that pop up on your news feed, or funny clips, is generally seen as proper online engagement. However, Bramdeo says platforms that present themselves as news sites, but reuse shared content without credit, create serious problems.

“As a legitimate news organisation, as all other legitimate news organisations, we are bound by policy; we are bound by ethics; we are bound by professional codes. And to consistently see how people bypass this, how these professional standards are overlooked, is sad for us as an industry, as news media. It’s a very sad indictment on our society. The SABC, and SABC News, in particular, invests massively in respect of the resources that we put in to create, to generate, to share public service news content. And therefore, the impact on us when that ‘content is stolen’, and I’m going to put it in inverted commas, it actually cannot be measured,” she says.

The editor of the Guardian newspaper, Obakeng Maje, says the online press media are also not spared.

“This also causes significant financial and professional damages because you would imagine, as a journalist, that you wake up in the morning and you go and gather some news only for that to be stolen by other social media platforms that are masquerading as newsfeed. What is surprising is that even our community radio stations, most of them, are doing the same. They will use another journalist’s work without even giving a credit. At the end of the day, the work belongs to the primary source,” says Maje.

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated content is also raising concern in the digital space, as it relies on content that is already posted online.

Glenda Daniels, a Professor in Media Studies at the Witwatersrand University, says it threatens job security for journalists.

“There isn’t proper policy about intellectual property rights and about copyright for news organisations and journalist bylines themselves, of course. So what we are finding at the moment is an aggregation of data. It just gets grabbed from the internet, pulled together, put together as a story and slapped on back onto the internet. The result of which is journalism. Journalists have lost jobs. Media companies are struggling to pay,” says the Witwatersrand University’s Media Studies’ Professor, Glenda Daniels.

Media professionals say better policies and regulation should be implemented for digital platforms, that technology companies must abide with.

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