THE INTERNET, PROBABLY – Swedish YouTube celebrity PewDiePie was disavowed by Disney and YouTube over anti-Semitic viral video content this week, in a story that we can not even begin to pretend to understand the particulars of or relate to, even a little.
According to reports, PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg (we assumed it wasn’t actually “PewDiePie” although who the hell knows) is some sort of man on the internet who shoots videos of himself hanging around and then receives millions upon millions of dollars somehow. This week, however, the Walt Disney Company severed ties with PewDiePie due to anti-Semitic messaging and imagery in many of his videos – and, apparently, solely for that reason.
Best known for playing video games and talking while doing so, PewDiePie is YouTube’s highest paid personality, earning over $15 million from the site last year – a figure we checked many, many times to ensure that it was accurate.
The trouble reportedly began when Kjellberg – who, again, had been given ludicrous amounts of money by two of the biggest companies in the world for some reason – began including Nazi iconography and messaging into his videos. Of particular note was one video in which he paid two Indian men to hold up a sign which read “Death To All Jews”, and then took that footage and uploaded it to YouTube, where hundreds of thousands of people bafflingly agreed that it qualified as media content.
Reached for comment a spokesperson from Disney explained “hey, if you’re looking for an explanation you’re barking up the wrong tree. Even we only barely understand what this guy’s deal was or why we were paying him. We only know we aren’t now, and that’s good enough for us.”
Additionally, YouTube itself has also turned its back on Kjellberg – a man who, to the best of our feeble, “Plato’s Cave”-like understanding of this situation, is paid spectacularly to exist after a Febreeze advertisement – and has announced that the second season of his popular webseries Scare PewDiePie – a thing where we guess people scare him? Probably? – has been cancelled.
At press time, the specifics of the story remain puzzling, but its key elements – “man becomes famous, but is awful” – continue to endure across all generations and media platforms.
