Almost a year ago on 2nd December 2023, the YouTuber Hbomberguy (real name Harry Brewis), caused bit of a stir with his video Plagiarism and You(tube). In this this almost four-hour video, he exposes a number of high-profile YouTubers of apparently plagiarising a lot of their content. It makes for quite an entertaining watch, but in showcasing the plagiarism rampant on YouTube, Hbomberguy actually teaches us quite a lot on how to identify plagiarism, the damage it causes, good academic practice and the danger of using YouTube as a source. He also highlights the danger of using YouTube as a source of information. Many of us, whether we are a learner or FET staff, enjoy using videos as means to help us understanding a topic and we should treat videos the same way as we should treat other sources.
His rule of thumb, if the work is largely identical to the Wikipedia article, or even just if the format or list of sources is identical to the Wikipedia article, the author or creator likely didn’t put too much effort in creating it. There’s a decent chance they didn’t even read those sources. When you cite sources, you’re stating that you have read them, if you cite sources you have not read, you’re lying to your reader by misrepresenting and overstating the work you have done. What if your source actually contradicts what you're saying?
One issue that comes up across multiple creators, is that they lean heavily on one source, even if they cite it. If a work, relies to heavily on a singular source, it makes us wonder why we are watching that source, it’s better to just go back and read the original. There can be reasons why we might focus on one source such as in a review, an adaption, an analysis or critique, but for a general essay (written or otherwise), it’s bad practice to focus mainly on one source.
Some of the YouTubers discussed make half-hearted attempts at creating a list of references or crediting some of the original authors in the opening credits, but this doesn’t truly credit them. There are number of reasons we reference our sources, it gives appropriate credit to the original authors, it makes it clear what parts of your work are theirs, and it allows to readers to go and check out this information for themselves.
It is also important to avoid using Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, to create a list of references. Generative AI is not a search engine, it can (usually) put words in the correct order to form a proper reference list but is prone to just creating lists of non-existent sources. As we can see from this post on BlueSky, if the student simply cited the source in question, without trying to find it first, their teacher wouldn’t have been able to find it as it doesn’t exist!
The main focus of Hbomberguy’s video was one Youtuber, James Somerton. Two hours of this long video is focused on his many many examples of still apparent plagiarism. The day after Hbomberguy’s video was released, another YouTuber, Todd in the Shadows, released a near two-hour long video that revealed that almost everything in Somerton’s videos that was not plagiarised was factually incorrect. When we look at James Somerton, we can see that his degree is in business and not in many of the subjects he speaks on. He makes no effort to fact-check his claims or back them up with sources. In Todd in the Shadows’ video, he shows one example where when asked about sources for a video on their Discord channel, James Somerton’s co-writer stated that it was based on “observations”.
This highlights a lot of the problems that we can find in many YouTube videos. The writers are not experts, so even if they put the work into researching a topic, they may not have the training needed to properly understand it. Their videos can have snappy editing, and they can deliver statements with confidence, but they are seldom backed up with sources. “Observations” are meaningless if the person stating them doesn’t back the proper sources.
As discussed in Hbomberguy’s video, there is a financial motivation for most of these cases. In the case of Filip Miucin, his plagiarised content helped land him a job with a large videogame review website, which he later dismissed from. While YouTube, can be a great place to share resources, knowledge and works of art, once there is money to be made it invites bad actors for who that is their primary motivation. YouTube videos can create money through a number of means, their ad revenue, creators can arrange sponsors and can also promote their other ventures. YouTube incentivises creators to upload a lot of content on a regular basis. This does not provide the creators with much to time to do their due diligence and research and cite their videos, and in their rush to create content they end up, either purposefully or through negligence, plagiarising, spreading misinformation or both.
In another video, ROBLOX_OOF.mps3, Hbomberguy shows off another example of good academic practice: Following claims to a source and verifying them for yourself. To spoil a two-hour video, in researching the titular sound effect, Hbomberguy ended up checking the claims of a well-known video game personality, Tommy Tallarico. In his career as a video game composer, he made a large number of wild claims. With only minimal effort and research, Hbomberguy was able to prove these false. In one example, Tallarico claimed to be on the television show, MTV Cribs. All Hbomberguy had to do to check this was check a list of Cribs episodes and found that he was never on the show. To paraphrase Hbomberguy’s own words “when something is easy to verify, people often don’t”.
Effectively what Hbomberguy is doing many times in this video is showing us the SIFT method in action, he stopped, investigated claims, found alternative sources and traced sources back to their origins.
Does this mean we shouldn’t use YouTube at all? Not necessarily, we just have to do our own due diligence. First of all, we should check if the creator has expertise in the area they are speaking on. Check if you can find other sources that verify their qualifications. Then check if they provide sources during their video, either during, at the end or in the video description.
YouTube videos by subject experts can be handy. They can help us become familiar with complex subjects. However, like with Wikipedia articles, we should avoid citing them. We can use them as a jumping off point, to get some familiarity on a topic, use them as a source of keywords for our own searches as well as a source of references to check out ourselves.
It can be great to have video content in the classroom or to use to help us understand a subject, but YouTube doesn’t have to be your only source of videos. The Digital Library provides access to Academic Video Online (AVON) is a platform hosting videos covering a wide range of subject areas. It covers a wide range of subject areas and has documentaries, training videos, interviews by creators and distributors such as BBC, CNN and Documentary Educational Resources (DER).
Image: Wikipedian Protester https://xkcd.com/285/ licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
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