Hbomberguy, after doing a video that deleted Tommy Tallarico by exposing a career of lies (even getting one of his world records removed in the process of research alone), put out a video discussing plagiarism where he, with receipts, showed Internet Historian, Illuminaughtii, and James Somerton conducted significant plagiarism. All 3 fan bases went feral over it. Somerton deleted his socials and lost a shitload of his patreon money and IH's fans are having a Normal One.
Somerton was the main focus of the video. He's a gay man who created a series of video essays that are basically all entirely plagiarized word for word from dozens of other queer creators, pretty much straight up stealing money from them. Hbomb has dedicated all the revenue he makes from this video to be split between everyone somerton stole from, which hilariously includes Wikipedia.
I used to watch illuminaughti but don't want to watch a 4 hour video about youtube plagiarism to find out what happened. Can you give me a quick summary?
Multiple times she made videos that were just word-for-word reading out the transcript of a documentary, even going so far as using the documentary footage as background imagery, without crediting the original at all. She also avoided youtube copyright detection by putting filters over such footage. Honestly I'm less upset about the plagiarism (which is bad, no doubt) and more just at the outright clownishness of literally copy-pasting somebody else's work.
In this case it's not really discourse so much as plagiarizing minority voices and directly profiting off them. Hbomb describes how a Somerton patreon subscriber discovered him reading her own essay back at her uncredited. She was paying him to steal from her.
Dude's also a misogynist. When he isn't stealing people's words his original contributions frequently attack white women, and he'll also misgender creators that he feels are "as bad as" women so he can attack them through the same lens.
I feel like in discourse you need two sides and nobody is on this dude's side.
yea, and it took way too long to come around to this point, which is probably the only meaningful criticism in this whole thing (except the observation that serial plagiarists also spread misinformation in their attempts to cover plagiarism, which is interesting). he could have made this video about misogyny with a side of plagiarism instead of getting his panties in a twist about a total non-issue.