(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37405217)

Not okay

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37437109)

YouTube’s most popular user is once again facing backlash — this time for promoting a highly anti-Semitic channel by recommending a video featuring a racial slur and a white supremacist conspiracy.

With 76 million subscribers, controversial gaming vlogger PewDiePie, a.k.a. Felix Kjellberg, is the most popular individual on YouTube. In a since-edited video posted on December 9, he recommended a litany of YouTube channels he said he’d been enjoying recently, briefly mentioning a YouTube channel called “E;R,” noting that it produces “great video essays,” including “one on [the Netflix movie] Death Note which I really enjoyed.” He also linked to the channel in his video description. (The recommendation has since been edited out of the video.)

To casual observers, PewDiePie’s support of E;R may have appeared harmless — one YouTube user supporting another. But a more-than-cursory dive into the channel would have revealed several instances of disturbing imagery, slurs, and white supremacist messaging.

The outcry against PewDiePie’s recommendation of the channel was immediate, with media outlets and other YouTube users citing it as an example of PewDiePie dallying in alt-right culture. In response, PewDiePie released a follow-up video on December 11 in which he sarcastically described the incident as an “oopsie” and scoffed at the idea that he was promoting neo-Nazism by merely “recommending someone for their anime review.”

“All I said was I like this guy’s anime review,” PewDiePie says in the video. “[The channel creator] apparently likes to have hidden and not-so-hidden Nazi references in his videos and obviously if I noticed that I wouldn’t have referenced him in the shoutout. ... I said publicly a year and a half ago that I was going to distance myself from Nazi jokes and that kind of stuff, because I want nothing to do with it. Generally, I’ve done that. I don’t really have a reason to dip into that again — it’s just stupid.”

But each of the three videos PewDiePie featured in his since-removed shoutout of the E;R channel featured fairly obvious examples of the channel’s offensive content — in fact, not only did part one of the Death Note review that PewDiePie said he liked directly invoke a racial slur in its video description (the description has since been edited), but the first 15 seconds of part two contain a blatant reference to a 2017 incident in which PewDiePie himself dropped a racial slur, strategically edited but unmissable if you’re familiar with the clip in question — which most of PewDiePie’s followers would reasonably be.

Essentially, anything more than the briefest research on PewDiePie’s part would have revealed the E;R channel’s overt anti-Semitism and white supremacist signifiers; its creator even sarcastically refers to his reputation as a racist in the channel’s FAQ.

Should PewDiePie have known better? His critics say yes; though he has been dismissive about the uproar, this is not the first time he has appeared to flirt with alt-right beliefs, and he’s previously faced backlash for this type of incident so many times that it now seems more than a little intentional. But PewDiePie and his supporters say his critics are overreacting to a harmless mistake — all while tens of thousands of new subscribers have followed the anti-Semitic channel based on PewDiePie’s brief endorsement.

If you think that’s alarming, especially given the many teens and preteens who watch and are influenced by PewDiePie, you’re not alone. In many ways, PewDiePie’s trollish irreverence and offense-proof shock humor embodies a more pervasive overlap between YouTube’s gaming culture and its alt-right culture. And the criticisms leveled at him in his role as YouTube’s most popular creator represent what seems to have become a larger battle to reclaim YouTube culture— a battle that in recent months has come to a head around PewDiePie himself.

The channel that PewDiePie linked to is a hotbed of anti-Semitism, racism, and alt-right rhetoric disguised as pop culture commentary

The E;R YouTube channel has a long history of anti-Semitic imagery and messaging. The channel’s anonymous creator, who uses the channel’s handle on several online platforms, also habitually links to his accounts on alt-right-identified social media sites — including Gab, which as Jane Coaston previously wrote for Vox, “is a focal site for neo-Nazis and others who want to espouse right-wing forms of anti-Semitism.”

The Death Note review that PewDiePie cited uses a racial slur to refer to one of the characters in the movie. The video also contains a reference to a false white nationalist conspiracy theory that Heather Heyer, the protester who was murdered at the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — and whose killer was recently convicted and sentenced to life in prison — actually died of a heart attack.

This indirect, dog-whistle form of alt-right messaging is common for the channel, which deliberately uses pop culture imagery, mainly drawn from animated series like Death Note and in particular the Cartoon Network TV series Steven Universe, as a tool for spreading white supremacist propaganda. Some of the many examples littering the channel’s videos include frequent references to media creators and other public figures using the historically loaded slur “Jews,” and references to anti-Semitic conspiracy phraseology such as “the Jewish question,” a frequent alt-right dog whistle that refers to the “Endlösung der Judenfrage” — German for “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” and the official Nazi code language for planning and carrying out the Holocaust.

The channel also refers to black characters from pop culture as “Negroes,” and contains mentions of being “redpilled,” blatantly racist imagery and stereotypes, homophobic slurs, mocking references to feminism and the idea of rape culture, sexist slurs, and sexist portrayals of women.

In the thumbnail for one video, the channel’s creator distorts a black actor’s face to exaggerate their features in a blatantly racist fashion. In another video, E;R turns a clip in which Barack Obama repeats the phrase “choose hope” into a deeply anti-Semitic slur referencing a notoriously horrific fact about the Holocaust.

And throughout many videos focused on Steven Universe, E;R presents the show’s characters as analogues for Jewish people, coding them with anti-Semitic stereotypes. In one such video, he portrays one character as a deceptive tool for a global Jewish conspiracy, as indicated by a montage of public figures and businessmen, and then ends the video with an altered version of a white supremacist slogan known as the “14 words.”

In other words, there is serious anti-Semitic and white supremacist propaganda underlying the “great video essays” that PewDiePie endorsed.

Since PewDiePie’s December 9 video drew greater attention to the E;R channel, YouTube has reportedly suspended one of the creator’s videos and issued a strike against the account for violating the site’s community guidelines. The suspended video, which according to E;R had 2 million views at the time of its removal from YouTube, was ostensibly about Steven Universe — but it also contained four minutes of unedited footage of Hitler delivering a speech. YouTube did not respond to a request from Vox for comment.

This is not the first time that PewDiePie has used his considerable influence to peddle alt-right messaging

To many YouTube users, the content of the E;R channel itself isn’t as concerning as the fact that PewDiePie — who, again, is YouTube’s most popular individual user — has endorsed it, and that PewDiePie has what is by now a well-established larger pattern of appearing to align with alt-right ideas and alt-right personalities.

In the days since PewDiePie first linked to E;R, the channel has gained 35,000 new followers, while many critics of PewDiePie, on both YouTube and other social media platforms, have spoken out against him.

“The largest fucking YouTuber on the planet made a video that got 7 million views in 7 hours,” Hasan Piker, a commentator for the left-wing web series The Young Turks, said on his own YouTube channel. “That seems like a fucking big problem, especially if the majority of his viewers are 14-year-old kids who are going to go over to this fucking channel and start watching this guy’s cartoon videos. ... [E;R] has an interest in red-pilling people and turning them over to Naziism or to Fascist ideology. How do you think this will play out when PewDiePie hypes this guy’s fucking channel?”

“[P]ewdiepie is, once again, doing exactly what neo-nazis want,” Kotaku reporter Nathan Grayson commented on Twitter in response to the incident. “[W]hether he’s just memeing or he ascribes to these values, it doesn’t matter. [W]hat matters is that he normalizes these ideas as jokes on THE platform where kids increasingly get their first exposure to the world at large.”

As Grayson notes, PewDiePie’s endorsement of the E;R channel continues a long trend of the vlogger using his influence in a way that helps to normalize white supremacist alt-right rhetoric to an alarming — and, on YouTube, increasingly widespread — degree. In 2016 and 2017, PewDiePie faced intense backlash for multiple instances in which he promoted Nazi symbolism and anti-Semitism, including a video in which he threw a Nazi “heil” salute, and one in which he hired a pair of performers from a freelancer website to hold up a sign reading “Death to all Jews,” ostensibly as a satirical exercise. He followed that so-called stunt with a video where he used a racist slur during a gaming live stream.

RELATED

The controversy over YouTube star PewDiePie and his anti-Semitic “jokes,” explained

Though the furor around PewDiePie’s repeated antics subsided after each of these incidents, his courting of alt-right ideas has continued. Though he has never openly identified himself as a member or supporter of the alt-right, he has continued to like and promote channels run by users with ties to the many overlapping internet subcultures that loosely define the alt-right. And earlier this year, he made a video in which he reviewed the right-wing personality and alt-right hero Jordan Peterson’s controversial self-help book. In the review, PewDiePie endorsed the book, called it a “fun” read, and said he would take some of its advice.

Additionally, in response to PewDiePie’s rec of the E;R channel, its owner described PewDiePie as producing “redpilled content.” And it’s easy to see why. Before declaring in 2017 that he would stop making Nazi jokes, PewDiePie made a whole lot of Nazi jokes. Even since then, he’s produced a long line of “satirical” videos and commentary that his alt-right followers have praised as examples of his “dropping redpills” on the rest of his fans.

While PewDiePie only follows a few hundred people on Twitter, many of them have ties to the aforementioned internet movements and subcultures that loosely define the alt-right, which include Gamergate, Mens’ Rights activism, Pick-Up Artist communities, incels, Reddit’s r/The_Donald community, some atheists and skeptics subcultures, and other online communities that foster white supremacy and radical right-wing extremism.

These include Peterson, the prominent Gamergate writer Ian Miles Cheong, Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson, YouTube philosopher Stefan Molyneux, the Canadian blogger Lauren Southern, YouTube sex education vlogger Laci Green (who made headlines announcing last year that she “took the red pill a long time ago” in reference to a new wish to begin publicly debating members of the alt-right), and leading figures of YouTube’s reactionary right-wing community, like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro. PewDiePie also followed notorious alt-right YouTuber Sargon of Akkad until the latter’s suspension from Twitter last year. (PewDiePie has not responded to a request from Vox for comment.)

RELATED

The rise of YouTube’s reactionary right

To his defiant followers, PewDiePie has come to represent a larger culture clash over YouTube itself. That makes his alt-right ties even more pernicious.

It can’t be overstated that PewDiePie’s massive popularity has given him unquestionable influence over the future of YouTube. In fact, his channel currently sits directly at the center of what seems to be a growing divide between two very different directions for an increasingly polarized platform.

On one side lies many overlapping subcultures that make up huge swaths of the YouTube population: its tremendous gaming communities, including Let’s Play-ers, live streamers, machinima-style editors, and vloggers; its prank cultures and their overlap with stunt personalities like Jake and Logan Paul; and its increasingly insidious alt-right presence.

On the other side lie many, many YouTube users who visit the site for other reasons and other forms of entertainment, and who arguably aren’t interested in supporting the cult of personalities that might be said to represent “old-school” YouTube. Instead, they come to the site for music, memes, narrative media, instructional videos, and more general forms of content consumption and entertainment.

These two ends of a vast YouTube spectrum have clashed recently over two interesting and arguably related phenomena — both of which directly involve PewDiePie. The first is an ongoing battle that PewDiePie’s supporters have been waging in order to prevent his channel from being surpassed as the most popular one on YouTube. To keep this from happening, they’ve done everything from take out a Times Square billboard to reportedly hacking into 50,000 printers around the world in order to promote their “subscribe to PewDiePie” meme.

The second involves YouTube’s annual year-end “Rewind” video. The 2018 video, released on December 6 and described by YouTube as “a who’s who of internet culture,” omitted a number of popular YouTubers, most notably PewDiePie. In response, PewDiePie’s followers started a campaign encouraging people to vote down the video, with the result that within a matter of days, YouTube’s 2018 Rewind video has rapidly overtaken an eight-year-old Justin Bieber single to become the most disliked video in YouTube history, surpassing Bieber as of early Thursday morning at 9.8 million dislikes and counting. By Thursday afternoon, the dislikes had topped 10 million.

A representative screencap from YouTube’s 2018 Rewind. YouTube

All eye-rolling at YouTube’s attempts to encourage community aside: When viewed in the context of PewDiePie’s extremely high level of influence over followers who are in turn deeply committed to waging meme war in his name, his appearance of flirting or even aligning with the alt-right becomes even more concerning. In essence, YouTube’s most influential personality is using his platform in ways that carry the potential to push millions of his already devoted followers toward online extremism. They’re already deploying the same tools of memeified, joking harassment and brigading that the alt-right is known to deploy — tactics rooted in the kinds of online trollishness that can seem purely jovial and harmless right up until it becomes something more.

RELATED

YouTube’s 2018 “Rewind” is the site’s most disliked video ever. The implications are huge.

The frustrating nature of PewDiePie’s flirtation with alt-right culture is that by repeatedly dismissing criticism as oversensitivity and insisting he’s just being satirical, he maintains the plausible deniability that the alt-right counts on to aid in distilling its messaging throughout mainstream culture.

Members of various alt-right movements, including the owner of the E;R channel, are fully aware of this. On his Gab account, when another user asked him, “What is the best way to red pill people on the (((Jewish Question))),” the owner of the E;R channel responded, “Pretend to joke about it until the punchline /really/ lands.”

But as the latest controversy around PewDiePie illustrates, his jokes have failed to land with many, many YouTube users, and there’s growing frustration with YouTube for not doing more to combat the growth of extremism in its midst. Though its most recent move of simply erasing PewDiePew from its rosily optimistic look back at 2018 might temporarily help to create a positive public image, when considering the evolution of PewDiePie’s influence alongside his steady drift toward the far right, it’s increasingly difficult to look back and laugh.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37427918)

he's still literally the most popular internet personality of all time. on what planet is he facing organic backlash? not one of his subscribers gives a single fuck what these kikes think.

this is why we call it fake news, folks. three hook-nosed kikes with kike platforms try to use his shout-out to another channel to INVENT a narrative that his video was controversial and that he's facing backlash. But none of that actually happened.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37427956)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37427937)

he has become more powerful than they could possibly imagine.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37427967)

"anti-Semitism, racism, and alt-right rhetoric disguised as pop culture commentary" as if commentary on pop culture by definition can't include any of those things

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37427998)

(((they))) tried to coopt him and now he tells other youtubers to stop listening to (((hollywood))) people selling them bullshit and just do their own thing.

he answers to no one and they cant forgive that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37435766)

https://dailystormer.name/stormer-volume-69-the-impending-martyrdom-of-pewdiepie/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37435791)

He baited them with the big stuff at first– the banner, the nigger word, and increasingly goes for smaller violations of social norms so he looks progressively more reasonable and they all the more dishonest. Links to external channels in descriptions, avatars of characters he just happens to be playing multiplayer games with. When the kikes ban PewDiePie over this, tens of millions of faithful kids will learn the nature of the yids. Every single one of them will call for the blood of the Jews and their children. In this dark technofuturist dystopia, the first pogrom will be started because of PewDiePie. Somehow, this feels right.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37435810)

Self Bio: "Aja Romano is a geek culture reporter and fandom expert"

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RWaMNsomksvoqb0tRF22Pg1niVE=/512x512/cdn.vox-cdn.com/author_profile_images/191459/me.0.jpg

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37435704)

the obliteration of youtube rewind is an important sign imo.

tech/legacy media stalinists are getting their holds blown out and theyre reacting with sheer insane panic. but the goyim know.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4155613&forum_id=2#37435737)