James Somerton was making $170,000 a year with nearly 6 million views and 267,000 subscribers on YouTube, until…
I mean the video didn’t just “accuse” him, it showed actual evidence and a metric fuckton of it.
Legal terminology
I mean.
Y u so mean?
There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually did try to write some of the material himself, it was complete garbage.
For example, he completely plagiarized from a book about Disney, but then, he had to transition between one plagiarized book and a different plagiarized article, and in that transition, he presented some facts about Disney organizing gay events at their park, and it was all outright lies. Disney did not actually have any official LGBTQ events at their parks until far after that.
There was a different YouTube video that came out the next day, from this musician who listed all of the outright lies that he discovered while watching Somerset’s channel.
I think the plagiarism displayed by Somerset is atrocious, but personally, I find lying and spreading misinformation to be even worse.
I think the Todd in the Shadows video was the nail in the coffin. He might’ve been able to slither back by saying he didn’t realize he was attributing incorrectly (like Internet Historian fans are screaming), but he can’t come back from outright lying the times he wasn’t plagiarizing.
Not to mention the rampant misogyny.
The queer community deserves better. Hopefully this will leave some room for other voices
I have no issue with the content provided, but I wanted to give a little constructive criticism on the structure of your writing. Real small. When you say,
There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually…
When you say there is a thing, the reader is going to assume the next thing you write to be that thing. So you don’t need the “which is that.” You can just launch right into what you’re going to say, you already set it up. You basically said “I have a thing to say. The thing I have to say is this:”
Everything else is informative and well presented. No other notes.
Would you need a semicolon then or not?
There was another aspect of the video; Somerset actually made up…
I don’t know that you need a semicolon but you could definitely use one, and that would probably be the best way. Semicolons are for when two complete sentences are related. But they can still be formatted as two sentences, or even the same sentence with a comma. Many sentences contain parts that could be standalone sentences. But reading back over the original sentence again I would probably say it can just be rewritten to be more straightforward.
“Another aspect to this video is that Somerset, when actually trying to write some of the material himself, produced complete garbage.”
Mostly I’ve just been reading a lot of philosophy recently which tends to run on a long and complex sentence structure that’s unnecessary and could be a lot simpler, so this kind of thing has been at the front of my mind lately. That’s probably the only reason I even noticed in the first place.
Eh doesn’t really flow compared to the original. I would have to reread to understand.
I’m all for omitting unnecessary words, but certain cliché connectors are so ubiquitous that they act as punctuation. You don’t notice them, but reading is less comfortable when they’re missing.
Do you have a link to that different video? I only saw the hbomberguy one I think
Is him being gay even relevant to what happened, or are they just trying to make this about something it’s not?
It’s very relevant. One of the big points in the hbomberguy video is that James was known as a prominent voice in the LGBT community, and he blatantly plagiarized other LGBT creators that might have otherwise gained a larger following themselves
His channel was about LGBT issues, so it’s actually relevant. It’s a reasonable concern and the source material is a four hour long breadtube thing bordering on self-parody, so I don’t mind responding to this one.
It’s core to Hbomberguy’s video, really. The guy tried to make himself the gay YouTuber by ripping off other queer content producers, and as a persecuted community that’s had to deal with a forever of social erasure, that’s a whole lot extra shitty.
I think it’s a little relevant. He’s a gay focused YouTuber, in that he talked about gay topics in media, supposedly championing gay voices, while at the same time silencing those same gay voices, stealing their content and claiming it as his own.
For wanting to help the gay community, he really did a lot to hurt the community and help himself. All he had to do is give credit to the people he quoted, but when confronted with accusations, he would claim he’s being silenced as a gay creator rather than admit the truth, and his followers would attack the accusers on his behalf, thinking he’s being genuine.
He wasn’t quoting people though, he was straight up reading other people’s work and claiming it as his own. Like whole paragraphs at a time just copy/pasted with a couple words swapped out. Even with proper citations you would be kicked out of college for plagiarizing if you submitted something like that.
It’s more than relevant. It’s pivotal to the whole ordeal.
It’s posted on lgbtqnation. I’m pretty sure that for their audience it’s incredibly fucking relevant.
Read the damn article 😐
Why? There are plenty of comments explaining it
I guess him being gay isn’t exactly important. The important thing is that the content that he stole was mostly about LGBTQ media studies. So “gayness” is relevant, but strictly speaking his gayness is not.
Edit: I would also note that if the headline writer was just adding “gay” to be incendiary, the writer could have said “Gay youtuber taken down by bi youtuber” but that would needlessly putting in the “bi” label. The “gay youtuber” is “writing” about gay stuff.
Ita an article from a website called lgbtqnation so its not that surprising. Also the guy stole a lot from queer people and was a misogynist.
It isn’t. Plagiarism is plagiarism. It’s maybe relevant that that’s what his content was about, but the plagiarism accusation has nothing to do with them being gay
Yeah but it has to do with the fact that he makes and plagiarizes LGBztQ content, specifically
I know that, but the commenter asked a different question. Being gay was not relevant to them getting caught plagiarizing content.
It’s relevant to why a publication called “LGBTQ Nation” would want to cover this story.
It’s fairly important because of the type of content that he is plagiarizing. Personal details can often relate and be important to the type of content that people make (or steal).
HAHAHA holy fucking shit the level of comeuppance is beautiful. Good riddance. His blatant misogyny and narcissism is disgusting, I hope he finds a cozy stone to crawl under.
Profiting from the cause, nice.
Be careful. Even if the cause is just, there is never going to be a shortage of shitbags willing to exploit it for their own gain.
Still not comfortable about him sleeping on those piles of money.
Nope. He was making six figures a year off other people’s hard work.
Just like most wealthy people, his wealth was stolen not earned.
Somerton, not Somerset.
Lgbtqnation really needs a new proofreader. I hear James Somerset is looking for… no, I mean… fuck
Good riddance
He finally deleted his YouTube channel. It was about time.
Popular YouTuber deletes online presence after video accused him of rampant plagiarism.
There fixed your head line.
Todd in the shadows took him to the shadow realm.
