The Video of the Dog Damn Tool Again
YouTube's almost popular user is once 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, gaming vlogger PewDiePie, a.chiliad.a. Felix Kjellberg, is the most popular individual on YouTube. In a since-edited video posted on Dec ix, he recommended several YouTube channels he said he'd been enjoying recently. One of those channels is chosen "E;R," and PewDiePie lauded its "great video essays," including "ane on [the Netflix moving picture] Expiry 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'south support of E;R may take appeared harmless — one YouTube user supporting some other. But a more-than-brief dive into the channel would have revealed several instances of disturbing imagery, slurs, and white supremacist messaging. E;R's creator fifty-fifty refers to his reputation as a racist in the channel's FAQ.
The outcry against PewDiePie's recommendation of the aqueduct was immediate, with media outlets and other YouTube users citing it every bit an instance of PewDiePie flirting with alt-right culture and sending a unsafe message to his millions of followers, many of whom are teenagers.
In response, PewDiePie released a follow-upwards video on December eleven in which he described the incident every bit an "oopsie" and scoffed at the idea that he was promoting anti-Semitism past but "recommending someone for their anime review."
"All I said was I similar this guy's anime review," PewDiePie says in the video. "[The aqueduct creator] plainly likes to take subconscious and not-and so-subconscious Nazi references in his videos and evidently if I noticed that I wouldn't take referenced him in the shoutout."
PewDiePie as well referred to several by incidents that sparked a similar outcry: a video in which he performed a Nazi "heil" salute, and 1 in which he hired a pair of performers from a freelancer website to hold up a sign reading "Death to all Jews." He said these examples were satirical, merely many observers condemned them as anti-Semitic.
"I said publicly a twelvemonth and a half ago that I was going to distance myself from Nazi jokes and that kind of stuff, considering I want nothing to do with information technology," PewDiePie explained. Generally, I've done that. I don't really have a reason to dip into that again — it'southward just stupid."
But each of the iii videos that PewDiePie featured in his since-removed shoutout of the Eastward;R channel featured fairly obvious examples of the aqueduct'south offensive content — in fact, not simply did part one of the Expiry Note review that PewDiePie said he liked directly invoke a racial slur in its video clarification (the description has since been edited), merely the first fifteen seconds of office ii incorporate a reference to a 2017 incident in which PewDiePie himself dropped a racial slur, strategically edited but unmissable if yous're familiar with the prune in question — which about of PewDiePie's followers would reasonably be.
Should PewDiePie have known better? His critics say aye; though he has been dismissive about the uproar, this is non the first time he has appeared to flirt with alt-correct behavior, and he's previously faced backlash for this blazon of incident many times.
At this point, I've stopped giving Pewdiepie the benefit of the doubt. Paying poor people to hold up a "Death to all J*ws" sign,saying the n-word on stream,promoting Ben Shapiro and the Ralph Retort,and his recent crap?How many times does this need to happen for people to see it?
— The Fierce Pacifist (@Desolate_Dude) December 10, 2018
But PewDiePie and his supporters say his critics are overreacting to a harmless mistake.
How many times can a person explain a fucking joke to multiple people
— 보라해요 방탄. 한상 (@xNataLeax) December 10, 2018
WHEN WILL PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT FELIX IS MAKING SATIRE, HE IS NOT SERIOUS MOST OF THE TIMES AND Terminate FUCKING TREATING EVERYTHING HE SAYS SERIOUSLY
I'm goddamn tired of telling people that @pewdiepie is joking pic.twitter.com/w7Y6eP9A3s
Regardless of PewDiePie's intent, any anti-Semitic commentary — no thing how "joking" — could have a unsafe outcome. PewDiePie's 76 million followers tend to skew immature, with the majority of his subscribers younger than 24 and eleven per centum of them younger than 17. And they are not passive fans; rather, they known for their aggressive loyalty to PewDiePie, to the point that they've created a YouTube-broad "subscribe to PewDiePie" meme that has pushed his follower count to virtually 80 million.
So what happens if these young, aggressively loyal, highly mobilized PewDiePie fans begin consuming extremist strains of YouTube content because they were exposed to it, either direct or indirectly, through his channel?
As ethnographer Crystal Abidin has written, "millions" of young YouTube users have previously been "seduced into joining camps and participating in global discursive debates in defence of/in opposition to Influencers."
And so the idea that PewDiePie is amplifying anti-Semitic and other extremist content to millions of impressionable young viewers is alarming.
The channel that PewDiePie linked to is a hotbed of anti-Semitism, racism, and alt-right rhetoric bearded every bit pop culture commentary
The E;R YouTube channel has a long history of anti-Semitic imagery and messaging. The channel'south anonymous creator, who uses the E;R handle on several online platforms, also habitually links to his accounts on social media sites known to attract members of the alt-right — including Gab, which, as Jane Coaston previously wrote for Vox, "is a focal site for neo-Nazis and others who want to espouse correct-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 picture. 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 Correct rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — and whose killer was recently convicted and sentenced to life in prison — actually died of a center attack.
This indirect, dog-whistle class of alt-right messaging is mutual for the channel, which deliberately uses pop culture imagery, mainly drawn from blithe serial like Death Annotation 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 canis familiaris whistle that refers to the "Endlösung der Judenfrage" — German for "Last 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 thought of rape civilisation, sexist slurs, and sexist portrayals of women.
In the thumbnail for i video, the aqueduct'south creator distorts a black role player'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 "cull hope" into a deeply anti-Semitic slur referencing a notoriously horrific fact about the Holocaust.
And throughout many videos focused on Steven Universe, Due east;R presents the show's characters as analogues for Jewish people, coding them with anti-Semitic stereotypes. In one such video, he portrays i character as a deceptive tool for a global Jewish conspiracy, equally indicated past a montage of public figures and businessmen, and so ends the video with an altered version of a white supremacist slogan known equally the "xiv 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 ix 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'southward 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 — just it also contained four minutes of unedited footage of Hitler delivering a speech. YouTube did non answer to a asking from Phonation 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 equally concerning as the fact that PewDiePie — who, once again, is YouTube'due south most popular individual user — has endorsed it, and that PewDiePie has what is by at present a well-established larger pattern of giving a platform to alt-right ideas and personalities.
That's alarming for multiple reasons — starting with the fact that the alt-correct has been rapidly gaining basis on YouTube. The motility encompasses multiple overlapping internet subcultures, merely is built atop a foundation of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and anti-feminist ideology. It is characterized by highly sophisticated messaging and recruitment tactics, frequent harassment campaigns, and an emphasis on irony, plausible deniability, and memetic behavior — all of which accept grown out of broader online civilisation, and which at present work as a seductive veneer for its ideology across grassroots internet communities on sites like YouTube, 4chan, Reddit, and other communities.
As Zack Beauchamp has previously written for Vocalization, "There'due south a tremendous library of far-right content on [YouTube], equally ane might expect on a largely unregulated video uploading service, and ... the videos announced to be constructive at radicalizing people. A not-insignificant number of people exposed to these videos ... finds them persuasive — and end upwardly joining the alt-right or other far-right movements as a consequence."
Which brings united states of america dorsum to PewDiePie shouting out a channel full of anti-Semitic rhetoric to his 76 1000000 followers.
In the days since PewDiePie start linked to Eastward;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 confronting him.
"The largest fucking YouTuber on the planet made a video that got 7 one thousand thousand views in 7 hours," Hasan Piker, a commentator for the left-wing spider web series The Young Turks, said on his own YouTube channel. "That seems similar 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 aqueduct and showtime watching this guy's cartoon videos. ... [Eastward;R] has an involvement in ruby-red-pilling people and turning them over to Naziism or to Fascist ideology. How do y'all think this will play out when PewDiePie hypes this guy'southward 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 go their start exposure to the globe at large."
As Grayson notes, PewDiePie'south endorsement of the Due east;R channel continues a long trend of the vlogger using his influence in a fashion that helps to normalize white supremacist alt-right rhetoric to an alarming — and, on YouTube, increasingly widespread — caste. He does this past casually incorporating it into his videos under the guise of shock sense of humor, then shrugging off any law-breaking as an "oopsie" when outcry ensues. In 2016 and 2017, for instance, PewDiePie faced intense backfire for multiple instances in which he promoted Nazi symbolism and anti-Semitism, including a video where he used a racist slur during a gaming live stream.
But despite having faced consequences for this behavior in the past, including losing a lucrative Disney sponsorship, PewDiePie has still been able to secure new marketing partnerships and abound his following.
Meanwhile, his followers have consistently shown support and love for PewDiePie and disdain for media outlets that have reported on his controversies.
"If your frame of reference is YouTube," Max Read recently wrote in the Intelligencer, one might view an attack on PewDiePie every bit "an attack on your close friend."
And though the furor effectually PewDiePie's repeated antics subsided after each new incident, his flirting with alt-correct ideas has continued. Though he has never openly identified himself as a member or supporter of the alt-right, he has liked and promote channels run by users with ties to the many overlapping cyberspace movements, communities, and subcultures that loosely define the alt-correct.
Earlier this year, he made a video in which he reviewed a controversial self-help book by Jordan Peterson — a right-wing personality who is beloved by many in the alt-right. In the review, PewDiePie endorsed the volume, called it a "fun" read, and said he would have some of its communication.
Additionally, in response to PewDiePie's recommendation of the E;R channel, its possessor described PewDiePie as producing "redpilled content." (In far-right discourse, "taking the red pill" or having been "redpilled" implies that someone has "woken up" to the alt-right worldview, which includes the belief that feminism is ruining everything and oft involves white supremacist domestic dog whistling.)
And it's easy to see why. Before declaring in 2017 that he would terminate making Nazi jokes, PewDiePie made a whole lot of Nazi jokes. Even since and so, he's produced several "satirical" videos and commentary that his alt-right followers take praised equally examples of his "dropping redpills" on the rest of his fans.
While PewDiePie but follows a few hundred people on Twitter, many of them have ties to the aforementioned net movements, communities, and subcultures that loosely define the alt-right, which include Gamergate, Mens' Rights activism, Choice-Up Artist communities, incels, Reddit'south r/The_Donald community, some atheists and skeptics subcultures, and other online communities that foster white supremacy and radical correct-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 Greenish (who made headlines last yr after posting a controversial video in which she stated that she "took the cherry 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'due south reactionary right-wing community, similar Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro. PewDiePie also followed notorious alt-right YouTuber Sargon of Akkad until the latter's suspension from Twitter last twelvemonth. (PewDiePie has non responded to a request from Vocalisation for annotate.)
It might not seem particularly meaningful that PewDiePie follows this specific group of people on Twitter. But in fact, a recent report from the nonprofit enquiry group Data & Society identified vii of the figures higher up (Peterson, Rubin, Shapiro, Sargon, Molyneux, Southern, and Watson) equally office of an "alternative influencer" network that has developed within YouTube — one that allows far-right extremists to spread their bulletin through frequent social interaction with more mainstream YouTube users.
"Social networking between influencers makes it easy for audience members to be incrementally exposed to, and come to trust, ever more than extremist political positions," the report's author, Rebecca Lewis, wrote.
To his defiant followers, PewDiePie has come to represent a larger culture clash over YouTube itself. That makes his alt-right flirtation even more than pernicious.
PewDiePie'due south massive popularity has given him considerable influence over the future of YouTube. In fact, his channel currently sits straight at the center of what seems to be a growing divide between two very different directions for an increasingly polarized platform.
On i side lies many overlapping subcultures that make up huge swaths of the YouTube population: its tremendous gaming communities, including Allow'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-schoolhouse" 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 2 interesting and arguably related phenomena — both of which directly involve PewDiePie. The offset is an ongoing boxing that PewDiePie'southward supporters take been waging in gild to prevent his channel from existence surpassed every bit the most popular one on YouTube. To proceed this from happening, they've done everything from have out a Times Square billboard to reportedly hacking into 50,000 printers around the globe in society to promote their "subscribe to PewDiePie" meme.
The second involves YouTube'southward annual yr-end "Rewind" video. The 2018 video, released on December six and described by YouTube equally "a who's who of internet culture," omitted a number of pop YouTubers, most notably PewDiePie. (The mutual theory about why these major players — particularly PewdiePie, Logan Paul, and Jake Paul — were omitted is that they've each become less-than-stellar examples of YouTube's customs in recent years.) In response, PewDiePie'southward followers started a campaign encouraging people to vote downward the video, with the issue that within a matter of days, YouTube's 2018 Rewind video has rapidly overtaken an viii-yr-sometime Justin Bieber single to become the nearly disliked video in YouTube history, with more than x million dislikes.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13624465/Screen_Shot_2018_12_13_at_12.59.14_PM.png)
The tactics of mass campaigning, meme-ing, and brigading that PewDiePie supporters accept deployed during each of these campaigns are hallmarks of classic online trollishness — the kind that can seem purely jovial and harmless right up until information technology becomes something more. The almost notable example of "something more" is Gamergate, the misogynistic movement that began in gaming culture in 2014 and has since expanded into wider, more overtly political harassment campaigns. The movement was born out of the most toxic impulses of gaming civilisation, and while it is not explicitly linked to PewDiePie or his followers, his deep involvement in gaming culture and Gamergate's overlap with YouTube communities (including the gaming, Pick-Up Artist, atheist/skeptics, and correct-wing political spheres) likely exposed many PewDiePie followers to both its tactics and its alt-correct politics.
Given PewDiePie's high level of influence over followers who are in plough deeply committed to waging meme wars in his name, and given that those followers are deploying the same tools of memeified, joking harassment and brigading that the alt-right is known to deploy, his appearance of flirting with alt-correct ideas and rhetoric becomes apropos.
In essence, as Read proposed in the Intelligencer, YouTube's most influential personality is using his platform in ways that could button millions of his already devoted followers toward online extremism.
"PewDiePie's status as the standard-bearer of True YouTube gives his position in broader political debates an outsize weight," Read wrote. "And if y'all get-go from the position that PewDiePie is great and his critics unfair (and possibly disingenuous), you may soon find yourself taking on some unfortunate new political positions."
As Julia Alexander noted in The Verge, the progression that Read describes is already visible; for example, some commenters on the Eastward;R aqueduct have expressed gratitude to the channel for exposing them to Nazi credo, in some cases "thanking E;R for bringing attention to some of Hitler's speeches."
The frustrating nature of PewDiePie'due south flirtation with alt-right culture is that past repeatedly dismissing criticism as oversensitivity and insisting he's just existence satirical, he maintains the plausible deniability that the alt-right counts on to assist in distilling its messaging throughout mainstream culture.
Members of various alt-right movements, including the owner of the East;R channel, appear to be fully enlightened of this. On his Gab account, when another user asked him, "What is the best way to crimson pill people on the (((Jewish Question)))," the owner of the East;R channel responded, "Pretend to joke about it until the punchline /really/ lands."
Simply as the latest controversy effectually PewDiePie illustrates, his jokes take failed to state with many, and when examining the reach of PewDiePie's influence alongside his credible drift toward the far correct, it's increasingly hard to express mirth.
Update: This story has been revised and expanded to add greater background context and data almost the people and subcultures under discussion.
Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/pewdiepie-vs-tseries-links-to-white-supremacist-alt-right-redpill
0 Response to "The Video of the Dog Damn Tool Again"
Post a Comment