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Blair Zòn (January 23 1993–), known as iilluminaughtii, is an American YouTuber who has gained infamy over the years for making factually inaccurate and plagiarized content all while being the absolute worst as a person. The account has over 1.25M subscribers as of 2024.

Plagiarism

See the main article on this topic: Plagiarism

A screenshot of lines 10-30 of her pastebin. Now tell me, could you figure out which of these sources is the documentary she watched just by looking at it?

One thing that is particularly infamous about Zòn's content is how she commonly takes other media, mostly documentaries and articles, and does little more than remake them for her audience. Hbomberguy in particular took notice of this and, on 4/20/2023, uploaded a short video onto Twitter showing examples of her copying the documentary MMR: What They Didn't Tell You for her own video on the anti-vaccine movement. Hbomberguy later discussed this in greater detail in his video "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" where he not only talked about this incident, but made note of how much of the video that was not from said documentary consisted of her reading other articles, most of which she took from the Wikipedia page of Andrew Wakefield, and he discusses her video on the Fyre Festival and notes how it is essentially identical to the documentary on the subject found on Netflix.

Of course, nothing is inherently wrong with using other sources in your content in order to create something original, however the issue with her work was that she was not only using clips from documentaries, but she was also repeating the narration — frequently word for word — while downplaying how large of a role this content played in the creation of her work. Going back to her video on the Fyre Festival, Hbomberguy notes how she briefly mentioned watching it for research at the end of her video and gave no other reference, in spite of the fact that most of her information came from that film in particular. Furthermore, he notes multiple examples of Zòn blurring out logos, watermarks, and other associated credits found in the original content for no other reason than her not wanting her viewers to have to look at the word "Netflix" on the vast majority of her footage (i.e., not including attribution, a key element of plagiarism).

In response to the claim about plagiarizing her vaccines video, Zòn uploaded a video defending herself in which she claimed she did credit the documentary that she used for research, specifically, she made it a link in a pastebin she put in the description of her videos. Comically enough, she herself was unable to refind the link to the documentary when scrolling through her sources in order to make this point, which goes to show the issue with this line of reasoning. Although her crediting of the source does make this slightly better than if she were to have not acknowledged the documentary in the first place, the fact that viewers would have so much trouble finding her sources (remember, she made the citation list and even she was unable to refind it) goes to show that she is, at the very least, not engaging in proper crediting of the material she is using.

Those in glass houses

On 4/20/2023, Zòn wrote a Twitter thread accusing the editors of YouTuber Legal Eagle of attempting to copy her style, noting emails they sent to her editors asking how they do certain effects, such as their use of stylistic choices like torn paper over quotes and highlighting the words they're reading.

Of course, much of this is too generic to be considered part of her "style" as she calls it, and Legal Eagle himself noted this in a tweet responding to these accusations, where he also mentions that his channel had been using these elements long before Zòn did.

Zòn did apologize for this the following day, although she did not make said apology public until a week after the fact. However, this incident is still notable if only because of the odd hypocrisy that Zòn presented in this situation. One would think somebody who so consistently borrows from the content of others would be more understanding of asking for help regarding the use of a rather basic stylistic choice, but instead she seemed to be under the impression that she personally owned these specific forms of editing.

Factual errors

Another common issue with her content is, to be blunt, she gets things wrong on a rather consistent basis. Going back to Hbomberguy, he uploaded a video on his second channel with the title "Iilluminaughtii and the perils of lazy video essays" where he goes into detail about exactly this, specifically noting her misunderstanding of the Stanford prison experiment and her incorrect statements regarding the lore of the video game series Silent Hill.

To be more specific, she uncritically repeated the conclusions from Stanford prison experiment when most people working in the modern psychology believe it to be a flawed study with notable methodical errors that keep it from being useful when it comes to understanding how humans would act in such a situation, and incorrectly says the entire video game series Silent Hill is based off of the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, when in actuality that is only true about the movies (Hbomberguy even note that people involved with the games have corrected this numerous times).

Hbomberguy is also far from the first person to note how frequently Zòn gets things wrong. One of Zòn's most popular videos, with nearly three million views at time of writing, is her 8/29/2020 work "The Aftermath of Seaworld." However, the video was full of nonsense, to the point where on 12/15/2020 a user a Tumblr named Derangehyena-Delphinidae made a post documenting twenty three different errors present in the video. This is far from the only time this happened, those in Vocaloid community have also had to take it upon themselves to correct Blair on her misinformation in the past, with both a Google Document and a commentary being made by those knowledgeable about the topic regarding her content. Her videos on PETA, regardless of what one thinks about the organization, have been shown to be based around misinformation primarily spread from astroturfed sources. Her video on BIID makes a series of mistakes about the disorder. Her video on Veganism had several factual errors and was described as "lazy" by one user who commentated on it.

Basically, any time she makes a video on a topic, those who are actually knowledgeable about what is being discussed find several flaws in her content.

Laziness

If the previously mentioned plagiarism and incorrect statements fail to give it away, her videos are incredibly lazy. She has previously acknowledged making three videos every week, with all of them being around four-thousand words in length, and its clear she does not have the ability to make videos that fast unless she refuses to do independent research or even put in the most basic effort to make sure her videos are of quality. Going back to Hbomberguy, he notes multiple examples of her videos being filled with failed takes that she just decided to leave in, or failures to pronounce things important to the topic at hand which could have been easily fixed. However, things have gotten worse quality-wise as time has gone on, with a video at the tail end of 2023 infamously having her audio cut out for five minutes. This is not even the first time something like this has occurred, as three months beforehand Zoe had uploaded a video with the exact same audio glitch.

External links

• iilluminaughtii Wikitubia