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Notes -
The Persecution of the Internet Historian
Internet Historian is a popular YouTuber whose best content is retelling interesting, fairly obscure stories with janky animation and luscious voice over. He’s an excellent storyteller and the videos are insanely easy to watch.
Left wing breadtuber Hbomberguy recently released an almost 4 hour video about plagiarism on YouTube. One of the subjects of the video was Internet Historian, and I think Hbomberguy credibly shows that IH was in the wrong. For his most watched video, Man in Hole, IH heavily copied the story and format of a Mental Floss article, as well as directly quoting entire paragraphs. IIRC, IH did cite the Mental Floss article in the original video, but it would be fairer to say that the entire video was an animated telling of the original article, and IH should have described it as such.
Furthermore, after Man in Hole was DMCAed, IH seemingly purposefully concealed what he had done, made excuses, and never fully acknowledged the extent to which he plagiarized, even after reuploading the video with heavy edits.
I think IH did a bad thing by committing plagiarism. Then he did another bad thing by trying to cover it up. I don’t think his life should be destroyed, but I think he deserves some score for this and my opinion of him has been lowered.
But if you ask some very online leftist people what’s wrong with IH, they won’t say plagiarism, they will say he is a literal Nazi - https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18dotzf/internet_historian_is_a_nazi/
That thread is by far the most popular ever on that subreddit, and lists evidence that IH is a Nazi. I’d summarize the evidence as “IH has a 4-chany sense of humor, has made some edgy jokes, and follows mainstream conservatives on Twitter.”
What I find most interesting about this affair is how difficult to convey to the breadtubey online leftists how vapid and dumb I think this evidence is. I think that’s because there’s actually a lot of cultural complexity here tied into some big gaps in moral intuition.
For instance, many of the evidence points are that IH has made jokes in his videos about Nazis and the KKK. In one video, he put 14/88 in the background, in another he uses a KKK caricature, and he has also sarcastically listed his birthday as 4/20 (Hitler’s birthday, though this might also just be a weed lmao thing). To the OP and most of the commenters, this is strong evidence that IH is a literal Nazi. Even if they acknowledge that these are edgy jokes, they can’t comprehend why someone would make light of something so awful unless they were secretly sympathetic to it. Or they just say that IH is straight up “dogwhistling” to align himself with all the Nazis watching his videos.
These arguments strike me as so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to bridge the gap. These jokes are not actually making light of Hitler, Nazis, and the KKK. They are making light of online lefties being pathologically obsessed with speech. Referencing Hitler isn’t funny; what’s funny is watching online lefties think that referencing Hitler indicates a deep seated hatred of Judaism and a real desire to exterminate non-whites. It’s the overreaction that’s funny. Or another way to put it – edgy Hitler jokes are shibboleths indicating that the speaker doesn’t buy into the predominant lefty internet culture. The speaker signals that he has such little concern for the culture that he considers stifling, censorious, and ridiculous, that he invokes the greatest taboo possible. IMO, this is the essence of edgy 4-chan humor.
Is this an accurate take? Or am I being too nice to IH?
I thought about making a similar post on Internet Historian (IH) here, but I thought it might be a bit too much like aping /r/drama, which would be this site's most obvious failure-mode. People seem fine with it though (which might be a bad sign, or I might be just reading too much into it), so I'll leave my thoughts.
The only thing to really fault IH for is insufficiently crediting the article in his original video. He did credit it, but should have been more explicit that the video was a dramatization. Even with this, though, there's leeway since copying is absolutely rampant on the internet. 95% of modern journalism articles are regurgitated from social media or copied from other journalists. Most prestige articles from things like Substack are using the main arguments from other people, repackaging them, and changing them only slightly. It's how humans work, and usually nobody bothers to cite sources. In many cases it would be very difficult to tell where one person's thoughts start and another's begin. HBomber seemed to think copying words was the obvious smoking gun, but apart from a few segments most of IH's video was so heavily paraphrased that this mostly falls flat.
The supposed "coverup" is just a maximally uncharitable way of looking at the situation. HBomber is trying to collect a scalp here so he's taking things out of context and manipulating the story to seem as damaging as possible.
Then the wider internet gets involved, and since IH tilts conservative the cancel-happy leftists see blood in the water and out come the Hitler analogies. By their own logic, anyone who's made a dead baby joke should be presumed to be a murderer.
Honestly given the amount of work it takes to make his particular style of video and the fact he's retelling historical fact, it's just silly to accuse him of plagiarism. At worst he wasn't sufficiently forthcoming with his sources.
Being a journalist, which is what IH is at core, is literally just retelling what others already told in a more entertaining or more accessible way. And if making intricate animation on top of historical fact that is inherently impossible to alter or copyright isn't transformative enough to prevent accusations of plagiarism, then nothing is.
Nobody believes this is anything but a political hit job.
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