No amount of success, not even 53 million subscribers, will protect you from the thought and speech police as long as you are reliant upon their platforms.
Let this be a lesson for anyone out there aspiring to become a huge YouTube star: just because you can amass a huge following, doesn’t mean that anything goes when it comes to content. Disney and YouTube have independently taken action against Felix Kjellberg, better known as “PewDiePie” and the biggest star on YouTube, after he posted various videos that contained anti-Semitic jokes.
Disney fired Kjellberg after an inquiry from The Wall Street Journal concerning some of his videos. Apparently, millions of people watched a video posted on January 11th on Kjellberg’s channel that included two men laughing while holding a banner that read “Death to all Jews.”
The Journal further said that since August, Kjellberg posted no less than nine separate videos that include anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery.
“Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case, and the resulting videos are inappropriate,” a Maker Studios spokesperson told the news site. Maker Division is owned by Disney.
PewDiePie saw a meteoric rise on YouTube by posting videos of himself playing video games and making jokes. He currently has more than 53 million subscribers who keep returning to see his clips. The Journal says that Kjellberg took down the January 11th video and two others, but not before they had racked up around 23 million views between them.
His YouTube popularity helped him score multimillion-dollar deals with Disney and YouTube.
This is why we absolutely need the Alt-Tech. This is why we need to start taking the cultural war seriously. This is why we need our own platforms. This is why Castalia has repeatedly turned down requests for movie options as well as acquisition offers.
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