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Some YouTube Stars Are Being Paid To Sell Academic Cheating (bbc.com)
A BBC investigation has found that more than 250 YouTube channels are being paid to sell academic cheating. Specifically, they are promoting EduBirdie, which allows students to buy essays, rather than doing the work themselves. From the report: The BBC Trending investigation uncovered more than 1,400 videos with a total of more than 700 million views containing EduBirdie adverts selling cheating to students and school pupils. EduBirdie is based in Ukraine, but aims its services at pupils and students across the globe. Essay writing services are not illegal, but if students submit work they have paid for someone else to do the penalties can be severe. The company is not just aiming to capture the attention of university students with its advertising. Popular YouTubers, some as young as 12, are being paid to personally endorse the service. In some of the videos YouTubers say if you cannot be bothered to do the work, EduBirdie has a "super smart nerd" who will do it for you. The adverts appear in videos on YouTube channels covering a range of subjects, including pranks, dating, gaming, music and fashion. Following the BBC's investigation, both have now removed videos with EduBirdie adverts from YouTube. A YouTube spokesman told the BBC: "YouTube creators may include paid endorsements as part of their content only if the product or service they are endorsing complies with our advertising policies. We will be working with creators going forward so they better understand that in video promotions must not promote dishonest activity."
That treasonous dunce can't even get away with colluding with Russia's attack on America without leaving an incriminating trail of emails from his idiot son to a person who identified herself as a representative aiding in Russia's assistance to Trump.
This is basic stuff. Rich white dumbfuck affirmative action will only get you so far. There is no way this retard finished a university degree without cheating.
Because eventually, you'll end up in a situation where the option to cheat won't be available, and you'll be exposed for not knowing your shit, or else you'll be caught, and then the jig's up. Any trust that anyone may have placed in you up until that point is shot to hell.
In theory it might give you a moderate head start at certain things, but in the long run it's so self-defeating as to not be worth the effort taken to conceal it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I think there are some easy technical solutions that can get around this problem. Just provide students with an online platform (you could even use a git repository or something similar) where they can upload their work in progress or even edit it in real time in a Google Docs type of environment. This is probably a better system than one large, final delivery anyways as it allows for feedback and discussion. It also is more likely to get students started on time if there are milestone requirements. Cheating becomes a lot easier to detect when someone with an IP from Estonia is trying to connect to the system. You could probably even create some agents that analyze the input as its being created to look for suspicious patterns such as someone pasting in large chunks of text or just typing the whole thing in without ever making corrections, modifications, etc. that would suggest you're not just manually typing something that came from a paper someone else gave you.
So much of that can be automated that it likely means that instructors can focus more on the content and working with students instead of having to worry about plagiarism, which can be difficult for humans to detect unless it's particularly blatant. A system like this might even provide some utility to students if it gets them to actually do some of their own work and develop their skills.
So if it's not illegal, why remove the ads? Lots of things that are bad ideas are legal and advertised. Youtube occupies a monopoly position and they're starting to flex their muscle.
I see nothing wrong here. Quite the contrary, it's an excellent example of outsourcing and copyright.
Better yet, I can edit key parts of it into my own voice and make it even more difficult to prove something was off. I outsource the work and receive a copyright that allows me to claim I wholeheartedly did all of the work myself. Don't come crying about academic dishonesty when the average tuition in a University is what $30k+? And yes, I know the article is about 12-year-olds using it which is hilarious. Stakes are too low, a master's thesis is more appropriate.
But why pay someone when you can just outline a Wikipedia article, use all of its citations, and rewrite the entire article as your own? Somebody did over half of the work already for free, I might as well get some use out of it. /How I blew through 99% of my libtard arts busy work to focus on what really mattered: beer and women.... erhm math and coding!
In days of old a professor could assign something simple that would force you to go out and do a lot of homework, cross-referencing, fact-checking and spell-checking, followed by laborious handwriting.
But the world has moved on. Today we have Google, Wikipedia, spelling and grammar checkers and helpful people in the Ukraine.
Lecturers need to get off their own lazy plagiarising arses and tailor their assignments to the new reality.
The first thing a good education successfully explains to the students is that only doing the work themselves will work. Some will get that, the others are lost to education anyways. And the way to identify the hopeless cases (who usually do not realize what they are) is to have exams where cheating is not possible. That cheating is rampart only illustrates that many educators have gotten lazy on the exams or are prevented from actually failing failed students.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If that's the worst thing they're being paid to sell, I'm not too worried. Sadly, there are far worse items they're paying influencers to hock.
...when I read that advertisers "...must not promote dishonest activity." What do they think advertisers do?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
1. The education system treated thee students paying for the courses like the actual customers they are.
2. Coursework was actually related to what the student wanted to learn.
3. Universities weren't just a sham created to blackmail would be middle class hopefuls into paying their cut before they could actually work on what their passion is.
Essays along with about two years of a four year degree are just busy work designed to extract as much time and money out of the student as possible. These students hiring others to do their essays are nothing more than smart students leveraging our capitalist system to their advantage. They should be given honorary MBAs.
For all the "you're just mad you don't have a degree" folks, blow me, I served my time and got my degree.
The second they started taking responsibility for the content on the platform they put themselves in an unwinnable position. Moderating YouTube is completely, hopelessly impossible. It's like nuclear war, the only way to win is not to play.
Now they are on defense against every internet investigator looking for the next thing somebody is doing on YouTube that people can get outraged about. The mainstream media sees YouTube as competition for viewers and YouTube has handed them the means to repeatedly wound them.
They made every channel with fewer than 4000 watch hours and 1000 subscribers lose their monetization and be subjected to review whenever a channel now reaches those thresholds. The original date they were supposed to be caught up with reviewing channels was the end of April. That has now been moved to the end of June. I'm not holding my breath on that.
Obviously smaller content makers are already abandoning the platform. Maybe this is the goal of the company, IDK, but less people are gonna go there to watch teletubbies stuff.
Youtube fell for the trap of trying to appease outrage peddling journalists. They'll always find something new about which they can generate fake controversies. Once they smell weakness they'll never stop.
I honestly think this is a good thing. They SHOULD be willing to take responsibility for the impact their service has upon society. Safe harbor provisions helped the internet grow rapidly, but we now find ourselves in need of the very curators that we celebrated escaping. It is the wild west on the net right now, and people are being hurt as a result. BILLIONS of dollars of both real money and intellectual IP are being stolen, identities are being hijacked, societies destabilized...all because no one wants to be responsible for the repercussions of their technology. They are happy to own things that make money, but not to take true ownership of them.
It's time the internet grew up.
If they didn't take any responsibility for content beyond what is legally required, how would they make enough money to continue the service?
I wish there was a way for them to do so, but so far no-one has found it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I think the real answer to this lies in the original Yahoo! design where you have curated content and then you have uncurated search results. Youtube seems to be going this way. For Youtube kids you can now select to only let your kids watch things that have been manually reviewed. Curation is valuable but it's also expensive which is why algorithms are often preferred. But there's plenty of room for improvement.
I have to wonder why schools don't use the FBI's tactics which they employ to catch would-be "terrorists," namely, flood the market on the Dark Web with offers for all manner of things you'd need to make a dirty bomb, or to convert your AR 15 into a full-blown machine gun, or to make a gun that fires bullets without leaving telltale marks on them, or their fragments, or that sell fertilizer and rental trucks, etc., so that when someone wants to buy some of this, they run a very good chance of trying to buy them from an undercover FBI agent or informant. You know, schools get together and make a slew of websites promising to do your homework for you, or send their own people in to offer to work for such places, writing term papers and the like for students, but also giving a copy to a clearinghouse all the schools can check against to see who is not only cheating, but PAYING someone to help them cheat, so as to put the kibosh on those students, and wreck their little cheating asses, for the sake of the integrity of their institution's education, and to preserve the value of the same for past, current, and prospective future students.
Or... do they already? How awesome would THAT be? (On behalf of all my fellow students who have NOT cheated, I'd LOVE to see all those who cheated get perp-walked the fuck out of class, and be sent to go flip Wuht-Uh-Burgurs or spend the rest of their lives serving MoreBucks Coffee to those who didn't.)
This isn't a case of mere resentment, bitterness towards those who have gotten away with antics like these historically, it's the fact that when I finally DO get MY SHEEPSKIN, that I will want that SHEEPSKIN will actually fucking MEAN something!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Is only legal and honest when corporations do it. When individuals outsource its cheating and dishonesty. Double speak at its finest!
Yes it is exactly the same thing as corporations claim products are their own with out disclosing all the parts of the product they have outsourced to another company.
1991: Trump Taj Mahal
1992: Trump Castle Hotel & Casino
1992: Trump Plaza Casino
1992: Trump Plaza Hotel
2004: Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts
2009: Trump Entertainment Resorts
So much winning.
As the adage goes, you only cheat yourself. Pretty sure you won't last very long in an occupation that requires proven subject knowledge, so why did you spend that money on getting a fake education? Yeah smart move.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Adwords has the ability to target specific videos or channels (the channels part doesn't seem to actually work). Advertisers have the ability to make their ads only show up where they whitelist them, if they are concerned about it. This would of course screw over the smaller channels whose videos would never get whitelisted by the big advertisers. But they are even more screwed over now because no one can advertise on them at all.