Hundreds of YouTube channels have had their videos removed from the site following a BBC investigation that found widespread promotion of an essay writing service as a way for students to cheat at school.
Last week, the BBC published an investigation that found that more than 250 channels had been promoted by a Ukrainian company called EduBirdie, which sells essays to desperate students. The company says its services are useful for "researching the issue, generating initial contributions for further reasoning and citations … paraphrasing according to the main educational standards and adapted to the guidelines of your college / university for plagiarism." hundreds of YouTube channels, which told their viewers that it was an easy and inexpensive way to approve their classes. In this case, the BBC discovered that the videos containing the endorsements were seen more than 700 million times.
Following the BBC's investigation, YouTube notified influential people that they would eliminate videos that did not comply with their policies. The BBC said that selling newspapers is not illegal, but YouTube says that while creators can include paid ads in their videos, they can only do so if the promotion complies with their policies. This is where the influencers had problems: the so-called "Academic Aid" was banned, which is defined as the taking of exams and the academic writing services on paper, which results in the elimination of several videos. The BBC noted that some channels eliminated more than one hundred videos.
In a statement to the BBC, EduBirdie parent company Boosta says it gave the "influencers full freedom on how they prefer to present the EduBirdie platform to their audience in a way they consider most relevant to their viewers." [19659005] In the last decade, an entire industry oriented to ghostwriting works has appeared for students of all levels, which allows undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students to cheaply buy work to pass their classes. In 2010, Chronicle of Higher Education published a report by Ed Dante (later revealed to be Dave Tomar) called The Shadow Scholar, in which he claimed to have helped write thousands of pages of academic papers for students , facilitated through a website like EduBirdie.