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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."
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.
"Congratulations on your promotion."
As an engineer, I will never be in a position of being "exposed" for being unable to write a good essay about Shakespeare's "Midsummer night's dream". Real life is not like college.
You are also presuming that people cheat because they can't do the work. I think I actually could write a good essay about MSND if I cared to. I just preferred to devote time to things that actually mattered, like my engineering courses.
And you are presuming that people only cheat on exams that don't matter to their main field of study.
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 just preferred to devote time to things that actually mattered, like my engineering courses."
A Midsummer Night's Dream was written over four hundred years ago. Care to tell us what you're working on now that people in 2418 will talk about?
Still think what you're doing matters?
This contemptuous and dismissive arrogance from engineers whose only contributions are to next year's e-waste is tiresome.
And I work in engineering.
Mostly random stuff.
You are also presuming that people cheat because they can't do the work. I think I actually could write a good essay about MSND if I cared to. I just preferred to devote time to things that actually mattered, like my engineering courses.
One of the time-honored excuses of cheaters. Turns out, they usually are quite wrong with their self-evaluation. Arrogance and stupidity have synergistic effects.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Building a career out of lying and cheating is like trying to hold build a dam out of rotted wood. Failure is often both catastrophic and impossible to recover from.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Essays are stupid unless you're going to write essays for a living.
90% of all assignments in school (from kindergarten through college) are busy work at best.
...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.
so why should they force me to write essays on "Shakespeare and the Semicolon"
Because we're only a step or two away from a plains ape and have trouble forming personal connections with more than about 200-300 people. We've some biological wiring that gets worked up about 'other' and 'outsider'. Shared culture helps. It teaches or reminds us of the values that we share. It means that if I meet someone from someplace I've never been, that I can make some assumptions about how they will act and behave based on shared values. It's not perfect, but it's what we've got.
You don't have to look at the elements that are important in building or defining that culture. You can pick most of it up second hand, so to speak, but living in and among people who have been shaped by exposure to those elements, but when the aim of education in more than just learning a skill, but is also about producing members of society who are well educated, then taking at least a minor look at some of the more influential elements and how they have come to be that way is useful.
Your essay on Shakespeare isn't the equivalent of a differential equation. It's closer to multiplication. It's basic, high school stuff.
Essays are a way of demonstrating an ability to organise your thoughts and present them in a cogent and organised fashion.
That you missed the principle behind the examples doesn't mean that it wasn't there.
for being unable to write a good essay about Shakespeare's "Midsummer night's dream". Real life is not like college.
Given your capitalization, maybe you should have spent more time working on that.
Programming is not a lone activity anymore. You write code in a way that other people will understand it. Understanding literature will help you write better code, for that reason.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
As an engineer, I will never be in a position of being "exposed" for being unable to write a good essay about Shakespeare's "Midsummer night's dream". Real life is not like college.
One thing I remember about essay writing is that it was marked based on the ability to form a coherent argument and get it across simply on paper. Based on some of the engineering recommendations I have seen in my time, a lot of you should have paid more attention in college, even if you didn't think the topic at hand was relevant, the skills that you were being assessed on were.
I just preferred to devote time to things that actually mattered, like my engineering courses.
This attitude often gets corrected in the real world when the person is limited in their field because the things they deemed unimportant actually turned out to matter quite a bit.