Have you ever gone to Ashton Kutcher’s website Aplus (as in “A+”)? You can see the site here – the layout is somewhat user-friendly (unlike Radar’s latest design) and the stories seem to be viral-content-baiting. That’s the whole idea behind Aplus, apparently. It is a “viral content site.” The stories seem a lot like the kind of stuff you can see on Buzzfeed, quite honestly. And as it turns out, that’s pretty much what it is. According to a new report on The Daily Dot, Ashton’s Aplus has largely lifted stories from other sites without properly crediting the original websites or authors:

Ashton Kutcher’s flagship viral content site has republished large quantities of material from across the Internet apparently without the original authors’ consent, a Daily Dot investigation has discovered. Relaunched in late 2013 to little fanfare, Aplus.com (stylized as A+) bills itself as “the fastest growing site in the history of the Internet.” It currently claims almost 30 million unique monthly visitors, though there’s no way to verify this number.

Kutcher—the television and movie star, Bitcoin user, and avid technology entrepreneur with financial ties to Path, Foursquare, Duolingo, and Skype—is both a cofounder and an investor in A+, according to the company’s AngelList profile. It’s unclear, however, if he’s the only investor, and how much money he has invested. The company first launched as A.plus in 2011, and it was essentially a custom Twitter client produced in partnership with mobile ad company UberMedia.

The current site’s success can be directly attributed to Kutcher’s constant promotion of its articles on his verified Twitter and Facebook pages, the latter of which boasts 18 million subscribers. Kutcher even promotes the site on his semi-private personal Facebook account, which the Daily Dot found using his verified Quora profile, and has fashioned his various social media accounts after A+’s design.

Outside of Kutcher, the site itself is fairly enigmatic, with no editorial masthead, no author pages, and until recently, not even an About page.

So who is actually publishing the articles on A+, and perhaps more importantly, where are the articles coming from?

A+ markets itself as a platform with a social conscience, aiming to “leverage viral social storytelling to create positive change in the world”—but the truth is rather uglier. The site has lifted content from BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, Cracked, Matador Network, and elsewhere—all seemingly without the authors’ permissions and with little in the way of source credits.

[From The Daily Dot]

If you’d like to see some side-by-side comparisons between Aplus’s content with the original viral stories, go here to The Daily Dot. They have lots of evidence that Aplus has been plagiarizing (without any kind of link-back to or acknowledgment of the original stories) Buzzfeed, Cracked, HuffPo and more.

For Ashton, it seems like a bad news situation all around. Either he’s responsible for this plagiarism and he needs to take responsibility for it and take the hit publicly; OR he will have to admit that he has little to do with the daily operations of the site and admit that he’s not some technology genius (and he’ll still have to take a hit). Of course, there’s always hidden option number three: that he will completely ignore this controversy and it will just go away.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.