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.
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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 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.