I get pewdiepies humor. I watch his videos anticipating his originality and I guess 54 million subs do for varying reasons.
His ability to express himself and generate content that makes me laugh repeatedly. He's not insensitive despite what some news articles say. The anti-semitism thing is so overused today its a little meaningless. The only way to push its worth is to generate headlines and articles to emphasis its importance.
He jokes broadly about every culture and only seems to have issues with one culture in particular, unsurprisingly.
It's reached a point it feels he's holding back something funny to please WSJ - a huge, huge tragedy and loss to his freedom and originality.
His freedom of speech doesn't override Disney's freedom of association or YouTube's freedom of the press; they're under no obligation to publish or promote anyone's content, and the counterweight to that is that people who don't like their policies can boycott them.
But you're unlikely to find a successful boycott organized around the notion that there should be no ramifications for paying strangers to hold up signs that say "Death To All Jews."
Our incentive is to pay lip service to freedom of speech while taking the path of least resistance and censor to keep angry 3rd parties happy. You might think this shuts down only speech beyond the pale. But we are still rewarding those who act most offended, and our wisest course is to kowtow more and more.
That stuff is no danger to a society when the soap boxes are distributed about land. But YouTube is a single platform in the position where it can one of the most effective censors of film on earth.
It is more more powerful in this field than any government, -- except those which can force our hand. Yet Google has the rights, and indeed duties of a private company. And that is a long-term danger to society and to the company.
I'm certainly not defending hate, etc. Just wondering - out loud - if the old countermeasure rules still apply.
Nobody is calling for zero offense; that's a slippery-slope argument that doesn't really apply to the situation. And nobody has silenced PewDiePie; he's completely free to continue to publish his content on YouTube (with proper community flagging, within the guidelines of the YouTube community, and even if he were no longer free to do so, he wouldn't be "silenced;" he'd just have to move his content to .mp4s hosted out of his own pocket).
What has happened is YouTube and Disney have both exercised their option to no longer pay the guy for being offensive, which they are perfectly within their rights to do.
In terms of the more general "Just wondering aloud" question: The old Streisand Effect is still in play, but the Internet is now a mature enough platform that it has "these sites" and "those sites." You can find all manner of things completely unacceptable to YouTube's community standards linked off of 4chan. Keeping them off of YouTube does probably make them a little harder for most web users to find (since YouTube's search, indexing, and relational systems are so convenient). That's likely working as intended.
Helping people say anti-semitic stuff doesn't seem like an inspirational position. Isn't the greater danger to society acceptance of intolerance?
On the contrary. Its completely acceptable for PDP to say whatever he hell he wants. The problem is that he wants to be paid by Disney while doing it.
The USA has freedom of speech. PDP is legally allowed to say whatever he wants. Unfortunately, PDP's revenue stream is (or perhaps... was...) Disney. And Walt Disney did not like PDP's Jew jokes.
There's no censorship here. This is PDP losing a financial sponsor / financial backer. Welcome to the real world PDP, your sponsors actually care about what you say.
---------
Wall Street Journal can do whatever. People have made fun of PDP all the time in the past years. That's not what's hurting him right now. Its the loss of Disney as a sponsor.
He wants what most people want, to make a living and Disney withdrawing as sponsor will likely not hurt. A bigger issue is WSJ and co efforts to have his ads pulled altogether.
You know the WSJ has absolutely no power over advertisers, aside from the SAME freedom of speech powers that PDP has.
If people feel he was "holding back his freedom" then Disney should NEVER have been a sponsor and WSJ did a service to wake up the community to sponsorship of content creators not creating content for the demographics in which his revenue was being generated.
my 9 year old used to love him, sang "this sammich doesn't have turkey on it" all the freaking time but now won't even admit his existence mostly because kids want to watch youtubers have fun and not hate.. even if its in satire - its not the right demographics..
The anti-semitism problem is a very specific angle to take particularly related to Disney and PewDiePie. Someone clearly combed his trove of videos and found every single Nazi reference; seem like a stretch to begin with. Idk theories.
Clearly the writings of a deranged individual.
I know it sounds all funny and stuff, but if someone is curious about how context, in this case at least the statements exposed curator pewdiepie, matters, Foucaults 1969 essay "What Is an Author?" is a great starting point to dig into:
I really don't think what he did was "honest" i.e. not meant to be provocative. As many sibling comments have pointed out, if you're making a living as a public personality, you kinda have to accept a higher level of scrutiny simply in order to avoid media hit jobs.
The hit job was some of the other items they'd cut together to make the "anti-semetic" charge stick. One item where he was comparing youtube policies to those of the Nazi's (i.e. casting both in a negative light) the WSJ used as "proof" he was pro-Nazi. that's what prompted my thought of the quote.
And their fans then defend them with "If you've seen their other stuff, you'd know that isn't unusual," which is a pretty thin defense---a bit like defending an arsonist with "Oh sure, nobody cared when they burned down all those grocery stores, but now that the WSJ is reporting on that orphanage..."
> There really is a joke there somewhere at Fiverr’s expense, and I think that’s what he was going for.
> The parts are there, loosely, if you cock your head and squint a bit. There’s an air of exploitation (on Fiverr’s part, but also often claimed to be on PewDiePie’s part) but it was a rush job. Seinfeld, in contrast, maps out goofy jokes about Pop Tarts down to the syllable.
I read and understood what slowbeef wrote. Delivery is the unmentioned point of discussion -- landing the delivery. It's the difference in whether a joke is funny or not. But changing delivery keeps the raw essence of the joke the same.
And I don't think it's fair to call it "holding someone accountable", if the same raw essence of a joke told with better delivery is suddenly OK. It's the same accountable action. If you're really interested in "holding someone accountable", shouldn't the same raw essence of a joke be wrong no matter how it's delivered?
I don't disagree that delivery is extremely important to landing a joke and it being funny. I do disagree that holding people accountable for bad delivery of a joke is somehow a moral impetus. That good joke was just as morally bad as the bad joke.
In other words, you could have taken a lot of George Carlin's material and run it through the ultra-politically-correct filter and come out deaf from the blaring alarms. But he's somehow above moral reproach because he's good at it? I don't buy it.
I think all this really goes back to the idea: Only the fool can criticize the king. Anyone else, and it was grounds for treason. I would have hoped we moved beyond that model.
I think that's why you see a lot of people saying that none of this was surprising for people who knew his material before hand. And I think the comparison elsewhere to shock-jocks is very apt. Such material is often suddenly found lacking when it gains an audience wider than it was targeted for.
And this also plays into the wider idea of, how responsible should a speaker be for "triggering" [0] a listener? That's a very heavy burden when your audience suddenly -- and not necessarily intentionally -- becomes "everyone".
[0] Yes, this is a somewhat lax usage of that term. However, it is also a common usage, so I use it as such.
It was predicated on the fact that WSJ took statements completely out of context to have the exact opposite of the in-context meaning.
("The hit job was some of the other items they'd cut together to make the "anti-semetic" charge stick. One item where he was comparing youtube policies to those of the Nazi's (i.e. casting both in a negative light) the WSJ used as "proof" he was pro-Nazi. that's what prompted my thought of the quote.")
My point was the the part where they conflated PewdiePies comparison of Youtube and the Nazi's as being him supporting the Nazi's, this was entirely take out of context. I wasn't referring to the sign there at all.
One of the best points I've seen was that Youtubers have a lot in common with talk radio hosts. When Howard Stern said something offensive, it was a bit rich to act surprised. He was paid to be shocking, he did better the harder he pushed on the edge of acceptable, and so of course he eventually went too far. Everyone from PewDiePie to Penny Arcade have run into the same issue.
(Under this framework, JonTron is a fundamentally different issue - he doesn't seem to have been looking for views, just melting down.)
PDP, unless he's stupid, should have known what DISNEY wanted. And it's not anti-semitic jokes, particularly following repeated use of Nazi iconography in his videos.
You're right that it exactly mirrors PDP's situation: off-the-cuff, inflammatory content creator partners with advertisers, does something extra-inflammatory, gets dropped by same.
What you're witnessing is mainstream (pretty much) America rejecting something they're now aware of that's too outside the norm. PDP can keep making content, but there's not really a likely scenario where he gets paid by Disney to do it.
It's worse than that. Richelieu was talking about absolute power of the State. Now the online power is made up of hordes of folks whose only reason to exist is to make their views the predominant ones and silence anyone who's diverging from them, even if that person was simply joking. There's a surprising good share of folks who are anti-Freedom of expression especially in Gen X and Y. Anyone who lived during the 80s would find the present situation intoxicating.
(Besides, I think that the "outraged" crowd often shoots themselves in the foot. If the content is not terribly out of taste, then the controversial content often get an added allure that may make it more popular. This was even true in much older times, books that were "banned in Boston" in the early 20th century often became more popular as a result...)
Oh, I think this is very different now from when it was happening back in time. Back in the 60s-80s, younger generations were the ones actually fighting for the Freedom of Expression. Nowadays the younger generation is the one pushing for harder stances to make people shut up. Look at safe zones in university campuses, it's actively enforced by students themselves.
To pick a hopefully neutral example, should it be "safe" for you to go to a chess club meeting and diss everybody there because you think Go is superior? They'll ask you to leave, and rightfully so.
It's a good thing to have these small "bubbles" for all sorts of minorities in which they get to define the rules.
Where it gets more interesting is when it affects the broader public sphere. That said, the particular examples you gave are ones where you'd be rightfully excluded depending on how you approach the subject. The evidence seems pretty clear that being gay or trans are real things. It took me some time to figure that out, but I found that as long as I approached the topic in a civil way, others responded in kind.
The problem is that the kind of people who complain about "anti-freedom of expression" or "excessive political correctness" are usually not the kind of people who approach those topics in a civil way. They have a certain foregone conclusion in their minds, and aren't ready to accept anything that contradicts that conclusion. So naturally, they end up being (justly) excluded from the discussion.
Your framing of this issue as simply being about LGBT wanting to be able to meet together without harassment is disingenuous.
The point is: Yes, the public sphere is also changing, but it's changing slowly, and the participants of the discussion who see a danger to freedom of speech are >95% hysterically exaggerating.
Meanwhile, it's good to keep in mind that there are <5% crazies in every group, including chess players and LGBT people. Listening to them is never a good idea.
[0] When you dig down, what you usually find is some minor committee discussing whether they should change the language used in their own bylaws and/or publications. I.e. it's not legislation, nobody is being forced to do anything, and most of these initiatives don't even pass in the first place.
> Examples of Violations
> a. Intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun or title. For example, repeatedly calling a transgender woman “him” or “Mr.” after she has made clear which pronouns and title she uses
[snip]
> And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.
Also, that entire last paragraph requires a great of assumption and stereotyping on your part.
Do our college students really need to be kept "safe" from mere disagreement?
Quite the opposite. Typically safe space warriors are demanding that people have different rights in public based on their genetics, not the same rights.
E.g. "You're a white man so shut up, I should have a special right to speak over you because of [XYZ]."
Here are some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM
Part of maturing is learning how to stand for one's ideas and beliefs, as well as learning how to deal with (bigoted) opposition to those. Isolating yourself, locking yourself in the echo chamber will make you unprepared for dialogue with those outside of it, or worse, will end with you radicalizing because you'll grow up with your standing never contested.
This is also going the other way. If you'll remove yourself from discourse, you will willfully marginalize yourself. How can local population know that LGBT people are living among them and are their friends/relatives/normal folk, if those people will lock themselves up in their safe spaces?
My favorite example when it comes to LGBT is polish activist turned politician, [Robert Biedroń](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Biedro%C5%84), who has spent life being vocal and visible activist for LGBT rights - extremely courageous feat in mostly catholic and conservatist Poland. The culmination of his work was gaining enough popular support to become mayor in 100k large city.
If this guy ran in my city, he'll get my vote. Even if I disagree with 90% of what he says because politically he always aligns himself with socialists and I'm moderate, I believe that what he does for making our society less bigoted is worth every support.
Now ask yourself, how many such Biedrońs will not come to be because they'll close themselves in their small worlds in fear of their feelings being hurt by some bigots?
I know you'll argue against that point, but I mention it not for you, but to put what you said into context for other readers.
Is your argument "oh, but racists are also shaping discourse of their societes"?
My post wasn't for you.
And I am confused how anyone here was silenced. This person's views, and the views of everyone who objects, and the views of everyone who objects to the objection, are all public. The video is easily available. Discussion forums that have nothing to do with his usual material, like this one, are discussing it. There's rich public debate about what he said and why he said it, fueled by an independent press that is not constrained to write only what serves those in power (any sort of power), and fueled even more by social media.
This seems like the epitome of freedom of expression. If I saw someone say "Hitler was right" and nobody commented on it, I would wonder where freedom of expression went!
Remember that the position that Hitler was indeed right is not one that lacks for support. The third Google result for me for 'pewdiepie hitler' is from The Daily Stormer, an actual, non-joking Neo-Nazi website, and the comments are celebrating how PewDiePie's viewers are being "red pilled" into understanding that Hitler's position is defensible.
The very notion of "I disagree with you (and will bring it to light) but will defend your right to say it" seems to be dead in modern outrage culture.
PDP: HA HA HA dead jews
His advertisers and many audience members: Not cool
white-flame: But my free speech!
PDP remains free to make any jokes he desires; he's just not free to continue to get his preferred advertising revenue or outlets.
Celebrities, unfortunately, are going to get hit when they say or do things that could piss off a bunch of people. I mean look at Muhammad Ali. He refused the Vietnam War draft as a religious conscientious objector. They stripped his title, his endorsements, and banned him from boxing. Not only that, but the appeals court did not even consider the merits of his case when they upheld the conviction. Or how Charlie Chaplan's passport was revoked after a FBI smear campaign and accusations of communism.
I understand people tend to look at current events in a vacuum, but saying something provocative and only losing endorsements is historically pretty good. Not even 50 years ago he would have had his passport revoked, been falsely accused of a crime, or some shady bureaucracy would have opened a file on him.
I support PewDiePie's right to say whatever he wants. I posted a link to his own video in another comment. I am thrilled to bring it to light. I don't believe that defending his right to say it involves defending his right to receive corporate funding or popular appreciation for what he says; "I disagree but will defend your right" seems to imply quite the opposite to me.
I agree that if you find yourself destitute (or actually lynched) as a result of public outcry, your right to speech is impacted, but I don't believe there's ever been such a case. Can you point me to one?
According to Pewdiepie, the WSJ pushed Google to suspend his Youtube account.
There, updated for contemporary KPIs.
I think you nailed it that stress is so bad that many have lost appetite to release new videos on a regular basis, and I've seen this in many youtubers I was following for years. Some gamers I know just don't want to edit anymore and instead release most of the gameplay or switch to Twitch completely and depends on just donation.
While the top youtubers can make over a million a year, it can become a no-life job in the end. There's also an impression at least from my PoV that many YouTubers are now in LA making LA their "Silicon Valley" (yes, after all LA is the SV for entertainment industry) but since the living standard there is pricey and different some YTers might be under unhealthy stress. There was a YouTuber who committed suicide last year. We don't know exactly why, but it was very unexpected for fans and friends, and while I really don't want to speculate, I just can't help but think career might contributed to the cause regardless.
WongFu Production ran from a channel of three college students making videos about Asian life in America to a production company of its own (their made shorts, movies, and even a YouTube original series recently, and also making films for others). Their production quality is amazing. My favorite gamers on YouTubes just record from their computer and have no production crew whatsoever. I think Smosh Brothers is behind a production team at this point, and their videos are pretty fun to watch. It depends, there are good and bad ones.
This is kind of related to the part of the story that informs you that you need weekly updates to stay visible to your subscribers because YouTube is weird. I'm not sure if that is true any more, especially with options like Patreon. I support 3blue1Brown and Primitive Technologies through it, and part of the reason I do is that they both take their time to produce quality videos.
Assuming the attribution of that quote is correct, that's got to be one of the most ironic utterances ever...
/Richelieu was anything but a saint, for a supposed "man of the cloth"...
And that is pretty much what all of this is about.
When that guy, who was dressed as Jesus, was banned by Fiverr, Pewdiepie stated: "Isn't it ironic that Jews[1] found another way to fuck Jesus over?"
Whether his quest to push the comedy envelope extends further than Nazi/Jew related material, I don't know.
[1] Fiverr is based in Israel.
Edit: And the predictable downvote within minutes. How funny that the fans of Pewdiepie, and his "free speech", have such a reaction to a post stating objective facts about what he said.
Is what you listed a complete listing of things he attempted to get through? Or just your selection of what he tried that was prejudice? It seems likely he also would have tried to get some other dumb things through on the level of dick jokes.
"Is what you listed the complete list of ingredients to this homeopathic medicine? Or just your selection of the poisonous ones? It seems likely they would have put in some other healthy things on the level of ginseng"
In this case, if the list contains mild things and racism, then its probably just that PewDiePie is racist. If the list contains nothing socially acceptable and some of it happens to racist well then clearly the whole thing was for shock value, and the racism was probably just a way to push your buttons.
Also, are you so sure we won't find something similarly damning in your whole life, or even in just in your past month?
We don't need that type of tactless behavior in online gaming. What happens on 4chan should stay on 4chan.
You're welcome to your opinion. But you also have to take responsibility for it.
There are countless millions of people with no careers at all. Clearly, our society doesn't believe in a right to having a career at all, let alone a right to keeping one's existing career.
If we're worried about the threat to PewDiePie's ability to make a living, to his life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, it seems like the fundamental problem is not with people on the internet having opinions, it is with the system where losing a career threatens all those things. Fix capitalism, implement a UBI, whatever, and then his loss of a career wouldn't seem like a threat to his ability to live a fulfilling life or to reach an effective means of speaking to people.
The same argument can be used to say, "Your opinions have consequences. In this case, shutting down the TSA's security theater program put a lot of TSA agents out on the streets. You have to take responsibility for it." Or "In this case, Edward Snowden almost ruined the careers of many NSA spooks who could never make it in the private sector." Or many similar things. Would you agree those are bad arguments for not fixing the TSA or reforming the NSA?
Just like no one gets to decide what kind of jokes are allowed to be told, no one gets to decide how someone reacts to those jokes.
We do have a serious problem that someone can say things in what feels like private, to what feels like a private audience, and they can attract a global audience very quickly. I said lots of dumb stuff both in person and online (on AIM or Xanga or something) as a teenager, and those are gone from the internet and that is very good. That seems to no longer be true for today's teenagers. I'm worried about this, and I'm specifically worried about the inevitable media circus once the generation that grew up on Facebook and Twitter starts running for elected office. Democrats will be vilified for liking Ayn Rand for a few weeks in 10th grade; Republicans will be vilified for liking Karl Marx for a few weeks in 11th. If you remember the hullabaloo over that one Bernie Sanders college essay, imagine that, 24/7.
But I don't see the "destroyed their career" argument being applied to teenagers; I see it being applied to people who basically have communication as their job. PewDiePie's entire career involves making as many people as possible watch him talk about things. Of course people are going to have opinions on what he says, and of course his career is going to be affected by whether the general public likes what he has to say. That's the career he chose.
Yeah, and people saying "Death to Jews" managed to murder six million of them. Yet apparently you think that is funny and beyond reproach, while taking issue with it is a serious problem.
Example: If an anti-vaxxer published their opinion in a private blog, you'd probably be OK with their speech (as misguided as it is). If the same person started promoting their "opinion" using a national newspaper, you'd be a lot more upset.
Moreover, it's documented that the WAJ article authors went after PDP's livelihood directly (they contacted youtube and Disney, PDP's sponsor) with their allegations and were successful when Disney dropped PDP and Youtube cancelled PDP's new show!
But should pewdiepie be punished for it?
What the articles critical of PewDiePie are saying is, "here is what he said and why we think it is offensive and why we no longer watch his channel. If you agree with us, you should also not watch his channel"
Everyone is free to read this opinion and then decide for themselves if they agree with the writer, or if they want to keep watching. If it turns out that so many people agree with the articles that PewDiePie no longer has an audience large enough to sustain him, then that sucks for the people who DO want to keep seeing him, but is just reality. If not enough people want to watch content of a certain type to sustain the producer, then that content will not be produced.
I don't think this is quite what you're saying, but "Why is your definition better than mine" reminds me of a lot of discourse I see about free speech, where free speech is an inherent virtue, and you should be able to say whatever you want to say without anyone doing anything about it - neither censoring it, nor objecting to it, nor listening to it with a critical ear or responding with anything other than "Yay, speech."
This seems to me to be the most fatal form of censorship. We're essentially sandboxing speech. Say whatever you like, as long as it doesn't actually mean anything. Participate in public debate, as long as it doesn't change. Respond to others, as long as you don't dare to claim that any idea might be wrong. What is the point of free speech in such a society?
If all ideas are equally valid, or at least the ideas of the inside crowd are valid and outsiders get a "who are you" response, why do we even try to have a democratic society? Just let the king do what the king wants, or the CEO do what the CEO wants. Comment and criticize all you want, as long as it doesn't have an effect.
But if we believe in there being a point to free speech, we should respond to speech with "Why do you believe that, and can you try to convince me that I am wrong while I try to convince you that you are wrong" instead of "Who are you to disagree with me".
That said tactless behaviour is unwelcome in online gaming.... really? I'm not a big gamer but large swathes of the community seem to be pervaded by tactless behaviour, PewDiwPie is hardly alone in that.
The fact that he's got 54 million subscribers implies that a decent proportion of the online gaming community are not averse to that style of content, for better or worse.
It has been very interesting to see youtubers come and go, a lot of them seem to burn out on the schedule of trying to produce content regularly, which I can understand, anyone who's edited videos would realise the time it can take to produce something of good quality.
Pewdiepie is an interesting case as he's far and away the biggest "real" channel on youtube (i.e. not VEVO or one of the generic youtube channels).
https://vidstatsx.com/PewDiePie/youtube-channel gives you an idea of the size, he regularly gets 5-10 million views a day!
The controversy seems very click-baity to me, I read the articles and watched his response videos. It seemed to me that he made some pretty bad taste comments (if you've seen much of his content that shouldn't be a surprise) and the WSJ deliberately sliced it up to take it out of context and produce the most sensationalised headline possible.
All reminded me of the quote generally attribued to cardinal Richelieu.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."