I'm curious about this UK site - handpicked.org - which republishes images from from social media accounts and other online sources. The pics are linked to the source, but don't carry a full attribution - just an icon and name to indicate where they came from. In some cases images are taken from other publishers like BuzzFeed. Some of the images even have copyright watermarks showing they came from a picture agency.
The site isn't reproducing the pics for review, or research, but apparently for commercial purposes. The main website doesn't carry advertising, though ads are visible when you view it in the web view of the Facebook mobile app. In the back end, images are taken from the source's URL, resized and re-served from the site's own server. They seem to republish most or all of the original image.
Is there any justification for this in law? As far as I know, images published on social media remain the property of the person who posted them - you can't use them without permission. The lack of attribution suggests to me they're doing it without getting consent from the source.