Thread by @EMicrostate

Something rotten in the state of Quora: A thread.If you've been browsing the history corner of Quora (and if so, I am so sorry), you may have been seeing answers by one Kevin Richardson, who at this stage has racked up some 1.3k answers and nearly 3k followers. (1/)

This may sound like a lot, and some back-of-the-envelope maths confirms that it is. Kevin's account was created back in August 2018, which means that he's spent around 40 months on the platform, so on average he has written 32.5 answers a month, around one every day. (2/?)

And these cover a wide variety of topics. Looking at his most recent ones, these include:
The American Civil War
Masculinity and crying
National identity in the USSR
Antisemitism in interwar Germany
Barbary pirates
Atlantis conspiracies
Evidently, a real Renaissance man. (3/?)

So let's have a look at one of these answers. 'What are some good unbiased online sources for learning?' is the question, and Kevin starts with the following: (4/?)

But hang on, there's something weird here. What is 'the sub' exactly? Quora doesn't have discrete sub-communities that bring together... anyone. It has topics of interest, but these aren't called 'subs'. But you know who *does* have 'subs'? Reddit. (5/?)

One of these subreddits, r/AskHistorians (shoutout @askhistorians), is one that I moderate, and a quick search reveals that the same question, almost verbatim, was asked on AskHistorians back in on July 2020: reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…
And moreover, it received an answer. (6/?)

Said answer is copied *entirely* from that of user /u/mikedash, with a minor edit to replace the reference to AskHistorians (AH) without actually considering whether the alteration made any sense. (7/?)

So as you may now be gathering, Kevin seems to be simply plagiarising AskHistorians answers, using a sockpuppet to repost questions with some modification, and then reposting answers to those questions written by AskHistorians contributors some months earlier. (8/?)

Except wait, it gets *weirder*. Take, for instance, the time they plagiarised me. Screencaps here for comparison, the first two being of the question and answers on Quora, the third being my original on AskHistorians: (9/?)

The original question on AskHistorians was posted back on 27 February 2020, and must have been reposted to Quora separately around the same time, because the two older answers were written on 28 and 29 Feb respectively, yet Kevin's is from 30 October 2021... (10/?)

Which means that someone *else* was *already* crossposting AskHistorians questions to Quora, and Kevin seems to have been looking out for those instances as well in order to plagiarise answers months or even years later.

But that's not even the wildest part. (11/?)

In the comments to that answer, there's the normal compliments by people who don't know it's plagiarised, but there is also a sockpuppet repeating, word for word, a different Reddit user's response to my answer, to which Kevin responded with my response. (12/?)

Twice. (13/?)

But these sockpuppets don't just replicate comment replies, oh no. At least one of these is one 'Jaxson Hudson'. For instance, on a question about Sudanese pyramids, Kevin seems to go on a complete tangent, while referencing a more direct answer by one 'Jaxson Hudson'. (14/?)

This seems odd at first glance, but it turns out that, surprise surprise, there is a deleted original question from r/AskHistorians, with 'Jaxson Hudson' copying an answer by u/albaccounts614, while Kevin copies a reply by u/RioAbajo. (15/?)

If that's not proof enough that 'Jaxson Hudson' is one of Kevin Richardson's sockpuppets, there are two distinct Quora questions about historical perceptions of men crying, where both Kevin and 'Jaxson' plagiarise two different answers to the same AskHistorians question. (16/?)

And it turns out, it's not just r/AskHistorians he plagiarises from. The smaller and more specialised r/badhistory, which for a while allowed question posts, has also been a target, with a few examples compiled here: reddit.com/r/badhistory/c…
(17/?)

One of Kevin's more popular answers is about dogs, and not about the history of dogs, but canine behaviour – which is I guess why his list of titles is 'Researcher. Historian. Africanist. Archaeologist. Biologist'. (18/?)
quora.com/Why-are-dogs-s…
(note: NSFW image)

I wonder how long it'll take before he appends 'Author. Dreamweaver. Visionary. Plus actor.' to the list? (19/?)

And oh by the way, the dog answer is plagiarised too, from this six-year-old ELI5 thread:
reddit.com/r/explainlikei…
(20/?)

So, who is Kevin? Well, we don't know as such. But we do know that his biographical information is, shockingly, also plagiarised from multiple sources. (21/?)

The first paragraph in his profile, describing his historical specialism, is cribbed from /u/khosikulu's bio in a 6 year old AMA from AskHistorians. (22/?)

The second, justifying his eclecticism, is slightly modified from the About Me section on thehistoryblog.com. (23/?)

The third is, well... very ironic given what we now know about Kevin. (24/?)

On top of this, Kevin seems to operate under three different names: Kevin Richardson, Kevin Richardson Emangongo, and Kevin Badiambila Frédéric. Nobody by any of these names seems to hold a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, as Kevin's profile claims. (25/?)

Kevin's plagiarised content has seen over 5 million views, 500k of those in the last month. And *all* of it is plagiarised from Reddit, the majority from users on r/AskHistorians who have actually bothered researching the topics in question. (26/?)

But the most damning thing of all is that his comments have been reported multiple times for plagiarism, by multiple users including myself, and so far #Quora has taken no action against the account itself. (27/?)

My own report was against my own plagiarised answer, but it is unclear if reports by others were also only against answers, or the account itself. But even if the former, it is extremely telling as to #Quora's near-nonexistent moderation... (28/?)

that multiple separate plagiarism reports on the same user have not resulted in said user's suspension from the site. It is also supremely ironic that the community being plagiarised from is r/AskHistorians, one of the most heavily moderated communities on Reddit. (29/?)

At AskHistorians we deal with plagiarism reports with great regularity, and we ban on first infraction, which, surprise surprise, does a lot to solve the problem. Quora's evident lack of oversight allows plagiarism and similar content theft to thrive. (30/?)

Long story short, this is yet another object lesson in why moderation is *vital* in maintaining online spaces, something that we at @askhistorians have built our ethos around. (31/31)

FIN

EXTRA

So apparently, Kevin has also plagiarised our standard boilerplate reply to questions about the history of antisemitism, with minimal edits...

MORE EXTRA

Looks like there's now a fourth account, this one named Josue Dennis Chance, and yes, it's also in a thread where I got plagiarised, with usernames edited to reflect the new sockpuppet.

Yet more: A mini-thread

A number of Kevin's plagiarised answers link to other past answers, which means that Kevin has to plagiarise *all* of them. This is most blatantly apparent with this answer stolen from /u/Commustar which references two other AH answers:
(1/3)

The first, by /u/RioAbajo, was mentioned earlier but is reproduced here for good measure; the second was by /u/agentdcf:
(2/3)

It is frankly extaordinary how much effort Kevin has gone to with this plagiarism scheme, to the point where the plagiarism is straight-up self-referencing.
(3/)

On the note of that extra effort, what's especially fascinating is that Kevin often likes to go out of his way to embed an image or video where one was not originally present in the answer, as I discovered while trawling around for other answers of mine he'd stolen.

Both of those are my answers, but in neither of them did I include those images. It's already clear from the fact that he does alter some wording that Kevin isn't just a repost bot, but this leads me to believe his schtick is more elaborate than just a simple copy-paste job.

Oh my god it gets even wilder: the 'Jaxson Hudson' sockpuppet has a short, seemingly non-plagiarised post claiming that FDR intentionally provoked the Pearl Harbor attack!

Oh also, while I have people's attention, we have, for far longer, known about a site that plagiarises AskHistorians answers called historyqa, so uh, that's also a thing to look out for and be very angry at
historyqa.com

Yet another update: as it turns out, the above paragraph was plagiarised from @HistoryByZhukov.