James Somerton was making $170,000 a year with nearly 6 million views and 267,000 subscribers on YouTube, until…

  • dellish@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Is him being gay even relevant to what happened, or are they just trying to make this about something it’s not?

    • camr_on@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

    • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • MudMan@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • ThrowawayOnLemmy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s posted on lgbtqnation. I’m pretty sure that for their audience it’s incredibly fucking relevant.

    • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Ook the Librarian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • stopthatgirl7@kbin.socialOP
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        1 year ago

        I highly doubt someone writing for LGBTQ Nation is adding “gay” to the headline to be incendiary.

    • qevlarr@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

        • qevlarr@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I know that, but the commenter asked a different question. Being gay was not relevant to them getting caught plagiarizing content.

          • Furball@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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).