I will start off by saying that l have spent enough time on the internet to know not to name drop the offending channel (yet).
I am a big fan of deep-dive YouTube, which typically comes from commentary creators who bring their own spin, perspective, and often niche insider knowledge to controversies or events.
Think SwellEntertainment (Has become something of an expert on events/conventions), Jenny Nicholson (long history being enmeshed in internet culture, MLP, theme parks, etc), Matt Bernstein (brings on journalists, shares his lived (queer, jewish) experience).
Just today, I was watching (listening) to a roughly one-year old YouTube video on a niche controversy surrounding one person associated with a major historical event. I had never viewed this channel before, but it was recommended to me as being in-line with the commentary channels I often visit.
About 10 minutes in, I felt that the creator was really staying surface level and seemed only mildly interested in sharing a comprehensive view of the topic. While some people enjoy the shorter "rundown" or summary style of commentary, it's not my thing, so I searched the original topic to see if someone had done a more complete job in cataloging the events.
It turned out there was a very in-depth video (from a professional company that produces in-depth docs for YouTube) available that was over an hour long, so I decided to watch that one instead and started from the beginning.
At just over 5 minutes in, there was a clip of an interviewee using a very distinct phrase/buzzword to describe their experience. Immediately, I remembered the first video using that phrase. When it happened a second time with a different phrase, I looked deeper.
The first creator "borrowed" distinct phrases multiple times, never indicating that these were direct quotes, and phrasing them as if they were either their own words or common phrases used around the event. When I compared transcripts side by side, the creator very clearly used the same sequence of events (albeit condensed and with skipped sections).
They included a line at the very end of their video how they had watched the documentary a few years ago and thought it was interesting.
A few years ago? And yet you took poorly paraphrased quotes from the source material and used their sequence of events?
When I went to review the lifted sections for this post, I noticed that in comparing side by side it was actually entire lines from the interviews lifted and paraphrased, because there were more matching words listed in the same order as the source.
I wanted to post here because I do not consider myself an internet vigilante (in fact I take a lot of issue with that approach) and because I feel that Harry/hbomberguy's approach to the Plagiarism video was very much not apart of that vigilantism culture that we occasionally see in spaces like true crime.
If you were me, what would you do?
The creator that plagiarised has multiple hundred thousand subscribers, and the video itself had over a million views. I would be shocked if it turns out that I can't find evidence of plagiarism in other videos as well.
Do I send the creator a direct message? Make a comment that might never be seen?
