Disney, YouTube Cut Ties With PewDiePie, Top YouTube Submitter, Over Anti-Semitic Videos (techcrunch.com)

jo7hs2 writes: Disney's Maker Studios has cut ties PewDiePie, the YouTube submitter with 53 million subscribers, over anti-Semitic clips the submitter released earlier in the year. The clips, three videos published in January, have since been removed from the channel. According to TechCrunch, "They included one skit in which [Felix Kjellberg, PewDiePie's real name] paid a Sri Lanka-based group of men to hold up a sign that read 'Death to All Jews,' while another featured a clip of a man dressed as Jesus saying that 'Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong.' Kjellberg used freelance job finding site Fiverr for both clips. He argued that he wasn't serious with either and instead wanted to show the things people will do for money." A spokesperson for Maker Studios, which was acquired by Disney in 2014, told the Wall Street Journal, "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." Writing on his Tumblr blog, Kjellberg said the purpose of the examples was "to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online." He continued, "I picked something that seemed absurd to me -- That people on Fiverr would say anything for 5 dollars. I think it's important to say something and I want to make one thing clear: I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes."

UPDATE 2/14/17: YouTube has also cut ties with Kjellberg. A YouTube representative confirmed to Business Insider that the company has canceled its YouTube Red original show starring Kjellberg. Business Insider reports: "Kjellberg's show, 'Scare PewDiePie,' was a YouTube original accessible through the company's subscription service, YouTube Red. The show was about to premiere its second season. YouTube is also removing Kjellberg from Google's preferred advertising program, which helps the platform's most popular personalities attract bigger advertisers."

Comments

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot: "Celebrity" gossip. Stuff that doesn't matter.

Re:Who cares?

[gravewax]

he is still right, Who the fuck cares, this is not supposed to be a pseudo celebrity gossip rag. We have enough shit that is border line whether it belongs here, this is so far into fucking no mans land you can't even see the border.

Who cares?

[sgage]

Who. Fucking. Cares? What is a PewDiePie? This is news?

disney are idiots

[mOzone]

pewdiepie shaved his ass and sent the hair off so someone could bake a cake ..and for valentine's day video had humping penis's for 5 mins ...100s of video along same lines ...and disney didn't care ....but the fiver video was the (((last straw))) ...lol hypocrites

Re:disney are idiots

[by (1706743)]

There's a difference between being generically offensive, and being offensive by targeting specific groups.

You don't have to agree that one is more offensive than the other, but to ignore that the two cases are different isn't particularly productive.

And on the other end of the spectrum you have stuff like South Park, which basically tries to be offensive by targeting *every* group; in some strange egalitarian sense, this makes it "less offensive," as the motives are clearly for humor, rather than hatred towards a specific group.

Re:disney are idiots

[Khyber]

"There are no possible jokes that can be made about the Holocaust."

Please. Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy. Anyone can joke about anything. The real joke as of current, speaking of time, is your disingenuous nonsense.

"The fact that you do not understand why this is so shows that you are at risk of something like it happening in your lifetime."

You mean the several other genocides which have happened since WWII, most fucking recent one being the Srebrenica massacre? That you're so blind to think that not one other genocide has happened, let alone in their lifetime, is yet another comedic tragedy, and it's your ignorance that perpetuates and furthers the possibility of these genocides happening.

"How could it be that less than a year ago it would be unimaginable that you could end up dying in a chemical weapons attack in Iran?"

Bullshit, son. They've got ammonia and bleach and aluminum over there, in great fucking quantities. Chlorine gas is easily manufactured in the home, and is ALWAYS a persistent threat due to the ready availability of the three substances needed. Yet another comedic example of your tragic dysfunctional logic processes. Looks like you can only go one or two steps ahead - you'd be a poor chess player.

"How do you feel about going off to fight Iran?"

You know exactly jack about our military capability, eh? Roughly three days of US Air Superiority would guarantee that it wouldn't be much of a fucking fight, let me tell you. It would essentially be as simple as rolling in and dropping the conventional explosives equivalent of a few nukes. Reality, we could simply take the entirety of the Middle East within two weeks, spend about a year fighting a ground war wiping out every possible bit of opposition using our advanced satellite technology to track targets and scan for them, and then that area is simply ours.

Assuming one had a competent leader and plan for them to execute, anyways. Can't say that with our current chief-of-leaks.

"You have absolutely no idea how easy it is for society to turn on a pin and exterminate millions of people."

I'm pretty sure the entire world was watching our election and is just waiting for the second part to happen.

Works better than expected

[Anonymous Coward]

[He] wanted to show the things people will do for money.

It worked better than he expected. Much better.

He actually exposed the hypocrisy of the loony-left media-industrial propaganda complex and the things they will do for money.

The media-industrial complex has been accused to be ignorant as to why it lost belly-up in Nov 2016. The reality is that there is no such ignorance. Instead it chooses to be the bitch of the loony hyperliberal special interest which actively stifles anything not conforming to its slave ideology.

Re:Works better than expected

[Anonymous Coward]

Think most people missed what his 'message' was. You can hire people say whatever you want. It doesn't even cost much. Somehow people want to pretend it is not going on.

Yes what he did was racist. But he also has a bigger message that most people seem to want to ignore. You can *BUY* whatever narrative you want. That is not a good thing. Hell he bought it for 5 bucks a head.

Think some billionaire with a chip on his shoulder wouldn't do the exact same thing? If not why not?

I personally think exactly that has been going on for a long time. My wife decided to donate to one of these organizations once. Holy hell, did we get real spam mail for years. I am talking 10-15 per week. All of these 'grass roots' organizations are clearly thinly veiled money laundering schemes for rich people to push whatever narrative they want. The DNC itself in the past year has been caught on tape many times buying trouble. I have 0 doubt the RNC does the exact same thing.

Irreverent vs. Inappropriate

[cervesaebraciator]

"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."

It's funny how one of these words has a positive connotation, and the other one a negative. This, despite the fact that opposing groups might apply each term to the same content. All inappropriate means in a context where one is praising someone for irreverence is that the irreverence was applied to a preferred group.

I am reminded of Isaac Hayes's objection to South Park's irreverence toward Scientology.

Re:Irreverent vs. Inappropriate

[MightyMartian]

Generally, in the post-WWII Western world, making Holocaust jokes or anti-Jewish jokes is seen at the very least in pretty poor taste, and it is indeed the kind of thing that could see people lose sponsorships, jobs, etc. Mel Gibson has been trying to like a bastard to rebuild his career or 10 years after the whole "Jews start all the wars" drunken rant, and while it seems like Hollywood is prepared to give him yet another chance, he'll be dogged by that (and that crazy-ass phone call to his ex-girlfriend, which in some ways I found a whole lot more disturbing) until the day he dies.

Every society has its taboo subjects, some taboo for idiotic reasons (like say, blasphemy and heresy), and some probably for good reasons. In general attacking Jews or mocking or denying the Holocaust are seen as pretty bad because it is feared, not entirely without justification, that latent anti-Semitism inevitably ends up in some sort of pogrom (that's pretty much been the history of the Jews for at least two thousand years, even longer if you buy pre-Hellenic tales of woe). Now, in places like Germany and Austria, that sort of thing is likely to get you thrown in jail, but in the US, the state has no role in determining whether speech is allowed or not, save within a pretty narrow scope of circumstances. That doesn't, however, bind private actors like citizens or corporations from disassociating themselves from people who make anti-Semitic statements.

Re:Semetic?

[by (1706743)]

I think this makes you anti-semantic...

So?

[Nunya666]

I cut ties with Disney after they outsourced their IT department.

News at 11.

You aren't training your feed properly.

[hackwrench]

There is a button somewhere on every video that you can click on that says not interested. Do that enough and they will stop showing up. For that matter I click the subscribe button on just about any fool that comments on videos I like regardless of whether they have any intention of making videos and am probably technically subscribed to PewDiePie, but his videos never show up as recommendations for me because I actually manage my blinking YouTube situation.

Re:Mickey Maus

[coastwalker]

Actually although this is meant to be funny it is not and neither was what Pewdiepie did either. I understand that for people under the age of thirty "Ironic" means that you can say anything. There are still a few older people around who are too square for that daddy o. There are some things that happened in the second world war that scared the fucking shit out of most of the planet when they found out what had been going on. You see the nice German people who are currently having the piss taken out of them because they are taking hundreds of thousands of dark skinned Muslims as refugees. The nice German people took 6 million Jews, Gypsys, Black people, Homosexuals and gassed them to death because they reclassified them as dangerous animals. Now I am not saying that being ironic makes you a Nazi death camp commander but you do not have any sensitivity to the slippery slope that the German people fell down. In other words you appear to be disrespectful to the idea that there are some ideas that are too horrible to contemplate even as a joke. Unfortunately as you have no idea what it is that you have done wrong it is apparent that the world is ready once again for horrible things to be done. It is no coincidence that Nationalism and hatred of foreigners is once again popular. The lessons of the Holocaust have been forgotten and the world is ready once again for appalling crimes against humanity So no, jokes about the Holocaust are never funny, not even ironic ones.

Re:Video here

[CustomSolvers2]

Without knowing anything about this guy (other than the South Park reference mentioned above), I know already a lot about his personality just by watching this video excerpt, his intention, his apparent motivation, his reactions, etc.: the kind of rich (or problem-free or egoist) asshole with a distorted perception of the world, overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of information and all what is associated with internet, responsible for a new wave of extremely-ignorant-and-completely-unaware fanaticism. I don't mean just the usual peculiarities associated with the behaviour of these youtubers, but the whole internet-based group-thinking movement: SJWs (bear in mind that I am an over-understanding leftist), Twitter or Facebook or whatever lynch squads and even programming-related fanatic and ignorant group-thinking (I know something about this too).

Just in case my position is not clear, here comes a summary of what I see in this video:

1. The guy firstly complains about the people to whom he has paid $5 (!!!) not doing what he wants. My impression is that these people were trying to give more for the paid price, kind of highlighting that all was a joke. If I was in his shoes, just watching these guys doing these stupid things for me because I paid them $5 would have made me feel horrible.

2. The expected result is delivered exactly as instructed; and this guy behaves firstly as if it was incredible (?! Weren't you complaining 5 seconds before because they didn't do it?!) and then shameful?! They are just words, exactly your words?! Don't you feel ashamed about writing such a sentence and hire some people to show it in a video, but you do feel ashamed of watching it in that video?! Why? Out-of-context words have no meaning, and much less the exact format in which these words are expressed; all what matters is intention. If you have ever had that thought, it would be equally bad than writing it or showing it in a video. There is no difference. There is hypocrisy, ignorance, self-esteem issues and being overhelmed by what you cannot even understand. Only a hypocrite can see any difference between actually doing/thinking/saying something wrong in one format or a different one.

3. The most incredible part and what perfectly describes the aforementioned new wave of half-persons with lots of power (or, at least, a very large audience): he dares to blame the two guys he hired for $5 (!!) for doing what he asked them to do!!! Even though he was complaining when they delayed that output for some seconds!! Complains about the world being wrong because some people have to work for an asshole for 5 miserable dollars! But he doesn't realise that he is the asshole!! He is the person who has provoked such an output! He had the intention (= all what matters)!

This guy thinks that paying $5 to people needing that money to do something pathetic makes sense. He thinks that being angry with these people in case of not doing exactly what he wants makes sense. He thinks that blaming these people for doing exactly what he instructed them to do makes sense. He thinks that feeling bad (better: showing that he feels bad) about a specific format (actually showing certain words in a video), but not caring about other (thinking about/writing these exact words somewhere else or hiring someone to write them) makes also sense. If he read the current post (or other descriptive-enough text), he would likely understand what he did wrong, even feel bad about his behaviour and never repeat it again. He would learn (basics about being a person) because he doesn't know it, but he is surprisingly unaware about this fact. He most likely thinks that his understanding capabilities are better than the average ones, thanks to his blind-supporters bubble. Other very curious issue of this kind of people is that they seem to think that what they deliver ($5 or his ideas in the video or anything else) is really valuable! No idea what others think, but the only feeling which they can provoke in me is pity. Is he a bad guy? He will

Bullshit

[JThundley]

This is a lot of bullshit. He was making a joke, it's very obvious. He wasn't espousing racist beliefs. Youtube and Disney took the clips out of context. Watch this video about the ordeal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLNSiFrS3n4

This also happened to another streaming personality, Destiny. He was having a debate about racism (he's against it), and said something along the lines of "If you're argument is 'n*ggers are too dumb to do X, Y and Z, then blah blah'. Speaking in the 3rd person; speaking as the very racists he's combating. I guess the N word is to controversial to say in any context, he was banned from Twitch.

And now I'm having trouble posting this because of the lameness filter! I can't say the N word here for the same reason! Jesus fuck! Yes I'm trying to say the full N word, no I'm not a racist, I'm sorry if you're offended, but fuck you for changing my speech.