by Jeremy Rogers
YouTube’s most popular content producer, Felix Kjellberg, has had a rough time in 2017.
He had his contract with Disney-owned Maker Studios terminated after an anti-Semitic joke aired on his channel in mid-February. Then after half a year without incident, Pewdiepie announced he would stop making Nazi jokes because of the Nazis marching in Charlottesville (but not before getting in a few of his own). Apparently, no one informed Felix about the KKK present at the rally, so he ended up using the N-Word in a recent livestream of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.
When Felix had his contract with Makers studios terminated, several prominent YouTubers came to his defense, such as Boogie2988, Markiplier, and more. This event was followed up by another prominent YouTuber, Jon “JonTron” Jafari, started making headlines for his consistent repetition of alt-right talking points.
Soon after, YouTube was making headlines, because advertisers like Walmart, Verizon, and McDonalds started pulling their ads from the online video platform due to ads being found on videos with racist or violent content. Channels have cited the resultant loss of ad revenue as a primary reason for their departure from YouTube.
Now YouTube’s biggest star has made headlines again for using a racial epithet.
Not only have YouTubers such as Matt Collins of Nerd3, “Angry” Joe Vargus, Danny O’Dwyer, and more condemned Felix for his words and actions as of late; some like Jim Sterling have even started claiming that PewDiePie is a liability for everyone else who uses YouTube to obtain their income because of his new racist image. “It’s because of shit like this that the ‘adpocolypse’ is happening where people’s videos are being flagged as inappropriate for advertisers, because advertisers don’t anything to do with [inappropriate content]… I worry [government regulation] is coming for YouTube, and I worry it’s gonna be the fault of people like PewDiePie who keep getting attention for shit like this.”
Fellow content creators aren’t the only ones lashing out at the embattled Swede. Sean Vanaman, one of the co-founders of game development studio Campo Santo, announced that the development studio will be issuing a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice on PewDiePie’s video that shows him playing the game they developed, Firewatch.
We're filing a DMCA takedown of PewDiePie's Firewatch content and any future Campo Santo games.
— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) September 10, 2017
Sources: YouTube YouTube Mic Kotaku Kotaku Game Informer PC Games N Image: Twitter Mic
