If you’re not currently in school or academics, then it’s probably been a long time since you’ve thought about plagiarism. However, in the last couple of months, plagiarism suddenly exploded as a topic.

On the Internet, the ball got rolling in early December, when YouTuber hbomberguy dropped a nearly four-hour video titled “Plagiarism and YouTube.” While hbomberguy discussed all kinds of plagiarism on YouTube, two people really bore the brunt of his ire. hbomberguy accused Internet Historian, a documentary YouTuber, of plagiarizing large chunks of one of his highest-profile videos, “Man in Cave,” an animated documentary about the death of cave diver Floyd Collins. However, hbomberguy devoted nearly half of the video to James Somerton, a self-styled LGBTQ+ historian who hbomberguy revealed had plagiarized most of his videos’ content from certified historians and other LGBTQ+ YouTubers. Hours after hbomberguy dropped his video, music YouTuber Todd in the Shadows poured gasoline on James Somerton’s funeral pyre with a 2-hour video bluntly titled “I Fact-Checked the Worst Video Essayist on YouTube,” where Todd demonstrated much of what Somerton hadn’t plagiarized he made up and/or used as a cover for misogyny and transphobia.

But plagiarism isn’t a YouTube-exclusive problem. Offline, the plagiarism ball got rolling on the campus of Harvard University. Claudine Gay, the first African-American president of Harvard, resigned from the position in January following accusations of plagiarism in her dissertation and in her academic work. The accusations were transparently politically motivated: the accusations came from Christopher Rufo, a high-profile conservative activist whose antics have gotten a mention on this blog before, and Aaron Sibarium, a journalist for the openly right-wing Washington Free Beacon, and these accusations conveniently came out as Gay was in Congressional hearings discussing antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. In a delicious case of irony, Neri Oxman, former MIT professor and wife of Bill Ackman, one of Claudine Gay’s loudest accusers, dealt with her own plagiarism accusations from Business Insider. A BI article presented evidence that Oxman’s academic writings were full of plagiarism and that she had plagiarized from Wikipedia in her dissertation.

And this isn’t an exclusively American problem. (As if a video from a British YouTuber focusing on a Kiwi and Canadian’s plagiarism wasn’t enough of an indicator.) Sandra Borch, who’d been acting as Norway’s minister of higher education since 2023, resigned from the role in January due to accusations of her plagiarizing her master’s degree dissertation. Her alma mater, the University of Tromso, announced in March that Borch’s master’s degree would be annulled due to the plagiarism.

There are more examples, especially since plagiarism accusations became a political tool, but those are the big examples. So, with all these examples laid out, let’s ask ourselves the million dollar question: why is plagiarism such a problem?

There are a couple of answers. The first is deadline culture.

Charles Seife, a journalism professor in New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, wrote an op-ed about the Claudine Gay situation. He made the case that the problem comes from an academic culture where the level of prestige an individual has is directly correlated to the amount of academic content (research papers, academic texts, etc.) you can spew out. A Guardian article discussing plagiarism accusations against British politician Rachel Reeves went for a similar angle, saying that the publishing industry with its high-pressure crunch culture inadvertently rewards authors who cut corners and plagiarize and/or don’t fact-check their sources. While YouTube and other social media sites don’t have deadlines, YouTube favors frequent uploads and long videos, hence the boom of daily vlogs in the late 2010s that made people like the Paul brothers, Casey Neistat and Emma Chamberlain YouTube superstars. James Somerton, by plagiarizing, made his videos algorithmically desirable by being able to upload 25 minute-1 hour videos way faster than if he’d done the research himself.

Second is technological advancements.

When I started writing this post, James Somerton had seemingly left the Internet. He deactivated his Patreon, Twitter and Instagram accounts, set all his videos uploaded to YouTube to private, and wiped his channel–no profile picture, no description, no external links, nothing. However, he recently returned, rebranded himself as James of Telos (Greek for “end” or “finish”) and made 17 of his videos public. I know he made more content than those videos, but that’s what available at this moment. I crunched some numbers: Somerton’s videos come to an approximate total of 14 hours of video content. Now, hbomberguy could have picked Somerton’s videos apart gumshoe-style, finding the videos and books Somerton plagiarized and comparing them side-by-side. More likely, he used technology, something like turnitin.com or some kind of AI that could sift through all that content and find lines or ideas lifted from elsewhere without proper creditation. In an Inside Higher Ed article about the so-called “plagiarism war”, Elisabeth Bik, a former Stanford scientist who now hunts for plagiarism in academic texts, says most of the worst cases of plagiarism she’s encountered happened before 2010. 2010 was the point where plagiarism-detecting websites and software really took off. In that respect, plagiarism isn’t some new problem that suddenly fell on the world of academics and social media like a ton of bricks. It’s always been a problem, but only recently did we get the technological means to show a sixty-minute video is mostly plagiarized and determine where the original writing comes from.

The third piece of the pie is the reason anybody cheats: it can take you places.

Yes, I know people say “cheaters never prosper,” and I guess this sudden exposé of plagiarism and the consequences are examples of that, but look how far the accused got before their fraud caused them problems. Claudine Gay made history by becoming the first African-American president of Harvard, this after a long academic career that included teaching at Stanford and being a dean at Harvard before becoming president. Neri Oxman enjoyed similar success, teaching at MIT and having her designs in museums worldwide. An LGBTQ Nation article about James Somerton estimates that at the time of hbomberguy releasing “Plagiarism and YouTube,” Somerton made $170,000 a year through his Patreon, plus an additional $65,000 he crowdfunded to start an LGBTQ+ movie studio and that sweet, sweet ad revenue money. Sandra Borch got to lead a branch of the Norwegian government before her plagiarism caught up to her.

So…what now?

As interesting and sometimes hilarious it is to see plagiarists get exposed, there’s not much you and me, regular Joe Schmoes, can do. Besides not plagiarize, obviously. Much like how Harvey Weinstein’s exposure as a sexual predator was the first domino in a long line of celebrities, I expect the couple of examples I’ve talked about today to be the first in a series of plagiarism scandals. The only thing I can say?

Don’t be one of them.