The forever war of PewDiePie: how mainstream media made YouTuber ‘poster boy for anti-PC crowd’
- Swedish YouTube sensation has responsibilities he doesn’t accept, say critics, who point to him recommending racists’ content to his 77 million followers
- Fans rush to his defence when mainstream media runs articles critical of him, as do right-wing personalities who seek to tap his audience
In early 2017, when The Wall Street Journal called attention to the fact that PewDiePie made Nazi jokes on his YouTube channel, fans of the most-subscribed YouTuber in the world went to war.
Erin, now 16, had been watching PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, for years by then. She understood that when PewDiePie paid two strangers through a freelancing service called Fiverr to hold up a sign that read “Death to All Jews”, the stunt was intended as extreme humour meant to criticise Fiverr – even if she thought it crossed a line.
But this wasn’t just some random online stranger. This is a person she felt she knew.
Why YouTube is still a ‘vortex’ of hate despite clean-up vow
When, as a result of the Journal’s reporting, Kjellberg lost lucrative deals with YouTube, Kjellberg and his fans increasingly said that the media was conspiring to take him down by smearing him as a racist, that the reporting on him was out of context, driven by a rival industry’s fear of jealousy.
Erin doesn’t always like how the media writes about YouTube celebrities. But when Kjellberg said the “N” word, in anger, while live-streaming himself playing a video game a few months later, Erin’s opinion of him changed.
Erin, who asked us not to use her last name out of fear of harassment, suddenly started to wonder who PewDiePie really was.
“It’s like if you had a pretty good friend of many years and you found out they were a racist: what would you do?” she says. She still watches his videos sometimes. But she no longer considers herself a fan.
