Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

The dilemma of terrible people

I had a few train trips this week and actually I liked getting back into the train commute vibe. It was also a handy interval of time to do something I would normally avoid: watching YouTube. Specifically, I watched 3 hours and 51 minutes of YouTube and even more specifically the Hbomberguy (Harris Michael Brewis) on the plague of plagiarism on YouTube. The run time of the video is intimidating but it is well worth the watch even if, like me, you have almost no idea who the various people criticised are.

The video is deftly presented, well researched and an absolutely devastating take-down of people just blatantly stealing what other people wrote. The latter part of the video focuses on one person in particular, James Somerton, who produces stylish videos covering LGBTQI issues in film and TV media. The scripts of these videos turn out to be mainly lifted from other people’s work with a few clumsy edits and a few original bits. The original bits often turn out to be factually wrong or just completely made up.

I think it is also obvious that Hbomberguy would rather not be doing this BUT having decided to pull apart the plagiarism habits of some YouTubers with high follower accounts, the right thing to do is to not pull any of his punches. The video is long because it is well documented, the original sources are identified and the common ways the video makers obscure that they are plagiarising and the common ways they respond to criticism are demonstrated.

But after was I was struck by an air of futility about it. I’m not criticising Hbomberguy, I think he did the right thing but four things struck me:

  • Firstly, that most of the various creators (“creators” being a bit of a generous term) identified will probably still carry on stealing stuff. Some may lay low for a bit, some may rebrand but the underlying reasons why people do this will continue.
  • Secondly, there’s going to people out there who will watch this video and take it as a “how to” guide.
  • Thirdly, Hbomberguy is going to be targeted for a lot of abuse from some fans of these video makers.
  • Fourthly, shitty internet people will also see these criticisms as an excuse to target abuse at some of the people exposed — in particular the people with marginalised identities.

The dilemma in the title is whether criticism of shitty online behaviour, even when done as ethically as possible adds to shitty online behaviour. Obviously I’m saying that as somebody with a blog and an award-finalist book criticising a notable case of shitty online behaviour (within which are sub-cases of shitty online behaviour).

If we don’t call out shitty behaviour then shitty behaviour only gets worse. If we do call out shitty behaviour then that can lead to even shittier people targetting the shitty person with abuse dispropotionate to their original shittyness.

Arguments, particularly within communities then can, through misunderstandings, anger and clumsy language hurt bystanders and fracture online spaces. Yesterday, I was reading about this incident in which it appears a YA author may have been using sockpuppet accounts to spam negative reviews of other debut authors on Goodreads, so that the author’s debut book would somehow look better…honestly, the plan didn’t make a great deal of sense but the evidence did point to this whole thing happening. Of course, in the denials and friends & fans of the accused author rallying around even more harsh words were said creating all the little vortices of anger that internet fueds generate.

Say nothing and shitty behaviour continues. Attempt to hold people to account and create a mess.

I think there are two issues in particular that fuel this:

  • There are no enforced proportional consequences. Authors, YouTuber etc aren’t going to get sacked or even get a caution from HR because they aren’ actually employees. Often, people know that whatever the emotional-abuse/racism/fraud/theft etc is being called out, that the accused can lay low for a bit and then start up all over again. Consequently, there is an understandable urge to make the “crime” as public as possible, to attempt the discredit the person so thoroughly that nobody will ever get taken in again by the scam.
  • There are free-floating bullies on the internet, particularly ones motivated by rightwing hate, who are happy to find a target who is cut off from online social support. If a woman, a person of colour, LGBTQI person etc is the person accused of being shitty online then they are going to be an especially attractive target for rightwing trolls of the KiwiFarms type. So, the legitimate identification of somebody as somebody being shitty online may well have the added effect of making them a target for extreme abuse.

I don’t have any answers here. There doesn’t appear to be a way through that avoids hurting people.

camestrosfelapton

, , , ,

15 responses to “The dilemma of terrible people”

  1. “There are no enforced proportional consequences”

    I think this is a really big factor in mob behaviour, both offline and online. If there are formal procedures in place to deal with unwanted behaviour, and people trust those procedures to dole out reasonable consequences, people tend to accept that and don’t join lynch mobs. When people get the impression that horrible people can get away with being horrible, some will respond by trying to take matters in their own hands.

    And that’s one of the reasons places like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook really need moderators who can enforce rules.

    Personally, I have developed a sort-of-policy of trying to not join in on situations where there’s already a vocal crowd that chases some target – regardless of how stupid I think the target has been and how much I want to add my own thoughts about that stupidity. Which doesn’t mean I never add my own thoughts about people being stupid, but it means I try not to be person number umpteen to say the same thing.

    Liked by 5 people

  2. Having watched the four-hour video from Hbomberguy (heard about it on Tumblr) and the parallel two-hour video from Todd In The Shadows (who basically went into detail about the factual errors in Somerton’s stuff), my main comment is that sometimes, even though it’s not going to have much of an effect in the long run, these sorts of things need to be done.

    The core problem (and it’s one other YouTubers have been pointing out as well) is that the quality control on YouTube (and the rest of the internet) is non-existent. It’s a brilliant example of why “leaving things up to the market to decide” is not an ethical or reasonable way of managing an information economy, because we get the equivalent of bad money driving out good. There’s nobody out there making sure that (for example) the “hack” videos aren’t pushing out harmful content; that the cake decorating videos aren’t overlaid with lurid “penny dreadful” style stories; that video essayists aren’t blithely plagiarizing in order to keep up with the required pace of content; that misinformation isn’t being packaged up in glossy production values and hawked as information; and so on. “The Market” is a lousy moderator (as we’ve historically learned before, and as we clearly have to learn again) and the values of capitalism are anti-social in the extreme.

    These sorts of things aren’t a problem in the small scale. Where they become problematic is as they’re reaching larger numbers of people – so I’ve thought for a number of years the most reasonable solution may be essentially one of scaling moderation to audience size. The larger your audience, the more scrutiny you undergo – the larger your audience, the more fact-checking you’re subject to; the harder you’re watched to ensure you’re not putting out harmful content; the more intense the requirement to put out better quality content in the sense of “content produced ethically (e.g. fact checked, not plagiarized) which doesn’t misinform or potentially harm its audience”.

    Liked by 5 people

  4. Hbomber himself asks what measures YouTube might take to solve plagiarism and concludes that any such efforts would make things worse, not better.

    Was his 4-hour exercise in vain? Somerton has folded his social-media tents and decamped with funds raised for short films that will never be made. Internet Historian’s fans won’t care so long as he keeps supplying them with nudge-wink rightist dogwhistles. iiluminaughtii was already becoming known as a bad actor and was hemorrhaging followers.

    On the plus side? The people whose work was stolen by Somerton are finally getting the recognition they deserve; and Hbomber has promised to donate all proceeds from his video to as many of them as he can find.

    Liked by 3 people

    • On the plus side? The people whose work was stolen by Somerton are finally getting the recognition they deserve

      That seems to me like a significant plus side that’s more than enough reason for this to be worth doing. The injustice of what Somerton types do isn’t just gaining false credit for the work, but also deliberately preventing the creator from being recognized. Even if the plagiarist’s gains can’t be taken back from them, any opportunity to boost the creators is meaningful.

      Liked by 4 people

  5. Solarbird (whom some here may recognize from ‘Crime and the Forces of Evil’) had a post last month called ‘Even on Mastodon, people are a problem‘ which argued out that Mastodon and the Federated spaces in general desperately need better ways to curate notifications. Because otherwise accounts with large numbers of followers might leave due to the overflow of petty comments they’re dealing with that aren’t quite bad enough to actually require a ban, and the people who joined Mastodon mostly for those big accounts will follow them away to wherever else they go.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. I feel like this may be a “perfect is the enemy of the good” sort of thing. There are citable benefits to hbomberguy’s video – we know this because ShrinkingViolet above cites them – but Camestros correctly notes that the lack of enforceable consequences from Youtube itself, and the fact that many of the people doing it will get to go on to keep doing it, and worries that these make the entire effort somehow pointless.

    But: It did have several effects. Original work got highlighted. Some bad actors have to back out. More people are not aware that they need to watch for this particular iteration. So that makes it a net good.

    As for the free-floating bullies? Sure, they’ll pile on. And it sucks, and they suck, and we all know it except themselves and the people who can’t distinguish between the sort of drama that warrants popcorn and the sort that is nothing but pain. But – people trying to make the world a bit better can’t wring their hands and let one ill thing (plagiarism) pass because another ill thing (Right wing bullies) will be given a target. One of the head bullies’ absolute FAVOURITE things is when people doing good work don’t do it out of fear of them.

    I also have opinions on the steady enshittification of places like Youtube, because they may wring their hands and say they’re helpless, or worse, pretend they’re above it, but it’s ALL on them, and there’s a lot more they could do than they have done. I mean, I’d like to believe that they don’t remove crappy autogenerated content because they’re busy cleaning up snuff films and porn. But we also know that they don’t actually include human content checkers at REMOTELY the level they could, or pay them remotely the hazard pay required. And that IS a choice.

    Liked by 4 people

  7. I think there’s a significant larger societal good to videos like HBomberguys: spreading the knowledge of what’s going on and how to spot it. I watch a lot of Youtube, mostly for educational content on history topics, and try to carefully curate who gets my eyeball time, which is limited. I watched a few of Illuminautii’s videos on MLMs because those organizations absolutely deserve a takedown, but something always seemed off about her videos. A lot of the time Blair didn’t seem to actually be aware of what she was reading — she put up one clip that used the word “sacred” and read it out loud as “scared” and just…kept right on going even though that made no sense in the context. Weird errors like that kept popping up and they made me uneasy for reasons I couldn’t identify.

    And now I know what it is. She didn’t know what she was reading because she didn’t write it. She stole it. That’s why so much of her presentation was so awkward and riddled with errors. Now if I see that kind of thing happening on a video I’m watching, I will know what’s going on and to avoid them. I think that’s very useful information — not just that this is happening, but what it LOOKS like, and SOUNDS like. It helps me keep my online BS detector properly tuned.

    Liked by 5 people

    • And while there may be some plagarists who will try to avoid the obvious tells, but still keep stealing, others will, I hope, simply give up if the cost of making plagarism gets even bit higher.

      Liked by 2 people

    • From what I understand, Blair has writers and is very hands-off in regards to dealing with those writers, so it wouldn’t surprise me that the first time she saw the script is when she sat down to read it. Which leads to an interesting question — if Blair isn’t writing her scripts, who’s guilty of the plagiarism?

      (It turns out Blair is a nasty piece of work, and none of this would have come out if she hadn’t accused another content creator of plagiarizing her style. And by plagiarizing her style, I mean the torn paper effect and the highlighter effect. You can’t write Greek drama better than that…)

      Liked by 1 person

  8. Hbomberguy mostly does games but every once in awhile he will do a long, very well researched, entertainingly delivered video about political and other serious topics. He seems to have undertaken this one for two purposes:

    1) To let creators know their work may have been plagiarized. A lot of the people the guy stole from had no idea he’d done it. They’ve been coming out of the woodwork in shock and trying to organize what they’re going to do. So on that alone, it was a public good — he alerted them to infringement and he gave them tools to check about other possible infringements of their stuff. And this wasn’t just stuff that had been put up on YouTube and plagiarized. It’s a much wider Web issue that hadn’t been covered much and now is getting increasingly complicated with the tools they are pretending are AI that are grabbing material right and left. Doing it as a very long documentary video essay was going to get a lot more attention than doing an article from other media. Past videos or game streaming fundraisers he’s done have helped Mermaids in the UK, etc.

    2) To try to pressure YouTube to do something about the plagiarists he noted and any other ones, especially those stealing from LGBTQ creators. YouTube is not monitorless. They’re quite happy to stomp on small creators and on left-leaning and marginalized videographers whenever they feel like it while they generally leave the incel/neo-Nazi, etc. area to its own devices because those areas bring in views. This has been an increasing issue with Google in general. But they will adjust and crack down on folks like these if they get publicly called out by someone with enough of a platform. And we do know that de-platforming does often work, is not futile. Sure, there are dozens of more of these kinds of folk right behind this guy, but societal pressure does shape things, regulations, laws even.

    As for the vitriol the person who did the bad thing might get when also being a marginalized person, bigots were already going after the guy because he’s gay. When they don’t have factual info about prominent marginalized folk, they just make things up. Hbomberguy is not really adding to the stream. Indeed, the guy can pivot to even more conservative circles if he wants or try to shape up, apologize and rebuild, up to him. And you can’t tell other marginalized people that just because the person injuring them and/or causing harm to their demo is one of them or also marginalized somehow that they can’t speak up about that harm. That’s how harm just keeps happening.

    As James Baldwin said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

    Liked by 1 person

Blog at WordPress.com.