#and there is a lot more harmful misinformation than that that somerton was apparently spreading

[kazz-brekker]

i'm glad the todd in the shadows video debunked james somerton's analysis of the 1992 dracula movie being faithful to the original book as total bullshit because while reading dracula in my victorian literature class in college, despite the fact that no one there had actually seen the movie, my professor gave us an impromptu rant about how much she hates that movie for adding the mina/dracula romance and removing all the homoerotic subtext. so the idea that someone pitching himself as a queer video essay youtuber was making that claim is personally very aggravating to me.

[duran-duran-less-official]

Ok ngl the fact that you refuse to watch the video before making an opinion on it strikes me as anti-intellectual. The video gives a very clear list of things to look out for for future instances of plagiarism and discusses why plagiarism (especially the plagiarism Somerton was doing which included stealing and harassing other smaller lgbt creators when they spoke up about it) is such a problem and how it’s easy to forget to check sources or think critically when it’s packaged in a well produced video like the ones he made.

I was not a Somerton fan (I bounced off his videos since they couldn’t hold my interest) but you have to understand he scammed a lot of people out of money while positioning himself as the True Queer Authority while spreading misinformation. Of course people are angry.

And were hbomb and todd just supposed to keep quiet about the fact that he was plagiarizing and spreading misinformation? If not for those videos, he would’ve kept scamming people. He was causing harm, and in an attention based job like this, the only way to stop them is to deplatform them. How else were they supposed to spread the word? Genuinely interested in how you think it should’ve been handled.

My guiding principle here is that when someone does a bad thing, the response to that should be proportional to the badness of the thing that was done.

The problem with HBomber as a handler of this kind of controversy is that he has no apparent upper limit on the number of hours he's willing to spend on this. And as I highlighted in an earlier post, he seems to treat any one thing he finds bad as equally bad as all the other things he talks about. I think it might be a consequence of the way his videos are formatted, and it all adds up to being disproportionate by definition.

Consider: If it's worth spending two hours talking in general terms about how plagiarism on Youtube is a pervasive problem, which I have little reason to doubt, why is it worth spending another two hours calling out one specific guy who does this thing that apparently a lot of people do? Does James McBlandname also kick puppies and protest against Planned Parenthood in his spare time? Like, the impression I get from that split is that one guy's acts of plagiarism are considered equally as bad as every other act of plagiarism on Youtube put together. And I'm sorry, I simply don't believe that any amount of plagiarism from one guy can be that morally bad.

As I said, this is a failing of HBomber's format, and the end result is that James Blanderson kind of... takes the fall for every Youtuber who has ever plagiarised. Is he worthy of derision? Yes, absolutely. Is he worthy of personally being a scapegoat for the entire Youtube plagiarism industry? There's practically no way that can be true.

It kinda makes me wish and hope that I never jumped on the Tommy Tallerico hate bandwagon—I legit don't remember if I ever have. But the same principle applies. Do intellectual property rights and their various abuses suck? No doubt. Does Tommy Tallerico deserve to be an icon of that particular sin when, say, the entire Microsoft corporation exists? Maybe not.

The question is, why single one guy out at all? Especially if it's a pervasive problem! If you're gonna go down the route of Prestige More-Than-Movie-Length Callout Post, the net result from that is you've entirely obliterated the online presence of one guy. Have you actually solved the problem? Even if the General portion of the video does the smart things, like tell viewers which genres of content farm are especially susceptible to this, or advising them how to spot when content might have been plagiarised as you're watching it, are people talking about that? Or are they talking about the one guy the other half of the video was about? What is your net impact here, and could it maybe be improved by cutting the video down to 30 minutes and being a bit more general?

All this doesn't even touch on how morally bad plagiarism is. Like it IS bad, sure, but there's degrees of badness. If you remember illuminaughtii's defining toxic trait as plagiarism, when in fact she was also very likely guilty of workplace bullying and financial/verbal abuse, then something has gone very wrong. I understand that this is Youtube, so the value of Content is at a premium, but maybe that means their own moral compasses have been warped, naturally treating plagiarism as considerably worse than the average person would or perhaps should. This is part of the point of me saying you aren't a Youtuber's foot soldier! They decided to make Youtube their lives, but you don't have to!