BuzzFeed Plagiarized My Short Film About My Experience With Mental Illness

I originally tried to get an article about what happened published but no one would help me to share my story so here’s what happened:

As many of you know, I’m a filmmaker and undergraduate film student and like any other nineteen-year-old Internet user, I loved BuzzFeed Video. Note the past tense. I used to drool over the idea of making videos for such a massive and millennial oriented website. So when I met a BuzzFeed Video recruiter at my university’s Cinematic Arts Career Week this March I jumped on the opportunity. After showing the recruiter my resume he urged me to apply online for their “Summer Video Internship” at BuzzFeed’s headquarters in LA. I went back to my dorm and applied the same day. The simple online application asked for a link to my “creative samples/portfolio” so linked them to my best short film, “The Diagnosis” that I made and posted on YouTube in 2013. “The Diagnosis” got me into film school and even won Best Student Film at the Clifton Film Festival and I felt confident it would help me to stand out.

About a week after I applied, I received an email from BuzzFeed that I did not get the internship. Though initially disappointed, moved on and I accepted internships at two other production companies instead, completely forgetting about my BuzzFeed application. Until on June 8th an actor from “The Diagnosis” posted the BuzzFeed video “If Physical Health Problems Were Treated Like Mental Health Problems” on my Facebook wall and joked that I had made the same video 2 years ago. As I watched the video, posted on BuzzFeedYellow’s YouTube on May 23rd, my stomach sank. BuzzFeed Video blatantly plagiarized of the concept and content of my film “The Diagnosis.” See below for comparison:

I may not be the first person to point out the stigma attached to mental health and its contrast to the way physical health gets treated, but BuzzFeed created this video suspiciously close to when they reviewed my film for their intern position. Ordinarily I would feel thrilled that such an influential company addressed the topic of mental health stigma, but when I dreamed about seeing my film go viral on the front page of BuzzFeed I never imagined it would be through plagiarism. When I shared this film with BuzzFeed I never authorized them to use or copy my original creative property.

Because I applied to work there, BuzzFeed could have easily asked for my permission and/or provided credit where credit is due. But instead they took advantage of a naïve student filmmaker with a flimsy YouTube Creative Commons License and no money for lawyers. After all, why would BuzzFeed hire or pay the creator of content they wanted to use when they could steal it for free? BuzzFeed gets to profit off of this intellectual property violation and I am not the first content creator who had BuzzFeed steal their work without acknowledgement.

Unlike BuzzFeed, I never made “The Diagnosis” to make money. I made my short film with a budget of zero dollars and zero cents, and then released it for free on YouTube so that the message could access the audience I felt it deserved. Worst of all, I made “The Diagnosis” about my deeply personal struggle with shame and stigma when I was first diagnosed with depression. My short film became a way for me to process and cope, as I based the characters and dialogue off of real people and conversations from my life. For BuzzFeed to cheapen my experience by stuffing my original film into their repetitive video formula and stamping their logo on it is not just plagiarism or taking advantage of a student, it’s extremely disrespectful. But if I have learned anything from my experience with mental health stigma, it has been not to let anyone silence me. Not even my former-favorite website.