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PewDiePie Calls Out the 'Old-School Media' For Spiteful Dishonesty
New submitter Shane_Optima writes: After losing his Youtube Red show and his contract with Disney, the owner of the most subscribed channel on Youtube, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (aka "PewDiePie"), has released a video response to the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream news outlets, who have labeled his comedy videos variously as racist, fascist or anti-semitic. In it, he accuses the mainstream media of deliberately fabricating and misrepresenting the evidence used against him because they are afraid of independent content producers such as himself. In the video, PewDiePie discusses the recent actions of the Wall Street Journal, whose reporters sent nine cherry-picked and edited videos to Disney, which led directly to Disney's decision to terminate their relationship with him. These video clips and others used to "prove" PewDiePie's guilt have been edited (he claims) to remove all context, to the extent of using a pose of him pointing at something as a Nazi salute and using a clip where other players are creating swastikas in a game and editing out the part where he is asking them to stop. The most-cited video in the controversy involves seeing if he can use the site Fiverr to hire someone to create a video containing an over-the-top message for a mere $5. After a couple of laughing males unfurl a sign saying "Death to All Jews," he recoils with widened eyes and sits, apparently dumbfounded, for another thirty seconds before the video ends, without him uttering another word.
PewDiePie's video comes several days after a Tumblr post where he attempted to clarify that the videos were intended to be comedy showing "how crazy the modern world is." He has not yet used the phrase "fake news" in his response to the controversy, but given the current trends surrounding that phrase, it isn't surprising that his supporters are resorting to it frequently. Is this all just another unfortunate instance of collateral damage in the war against far-right political movements, is it a campaign of malicious retaliation by old media that is terrified of new media (as Felix claims), or was J.K. Rowling correct when she called out PewDiePie as a Death Eater? Err, I mean, ...as a fascist?
Update: Apparently, canceling his Youtube Red series was deemed an insufficient response. Youtube has now removed the mirror of PewDiePie's "Death to All Jews" video because it "violates Youtube's policy on hate speech." The original posting of the video had already been marked private by PewDiePie shortly after the controversy erupted. A quick check of Vimeo and Daily Motion came up empty, so you're on your own if you wish to find out for yourself what the controversy was all about.
PewDiePie's video comes several days after a Tumblr post where he attempted to clarify that the videos were intended to be comedy showing "how crazy the modern world is." He has not yet used the phrase "fake news" in his response to the controversy, but given the current trends surrounding that phrase, it isn't surprising that his supporters are resorting to it frequently. Is this all just another unfortunate instance of collateral damage in the war against far-right political movements, is it a campaign of malicious retaliation by old media that is terrified of new media (as Felix claims), or was J.K. Rowling correct when she called out PewDiePie as a Death Eater? Err, I mean, ...as a fascist?
Update: Apparently, canceling his Youtube Red series was deemed an insufficient response. Youtube has now removed the mirror of PewDiePie's "Death to All Jews" video because it "violates Youtube's policy on hate speech." The original posting of the video had already been marked private by PewDiePie shortly after the controversy erupted. A quick check of Vimeo and Daily Motion came up empty, so you're on your own if you wish to find out for yourself what the controversy was all about.
Anyone with any sense of intellectual integrity can clearly see that it was all satire. They can also see through the dishonesty of the media. This is just a taste of what the media has been doing politically. Regardless of how you feel about the current POTUS, these tactics are exactly the same tactics used against him from the MSM.
Follow the dollars. This stuff generates clicks. It gets people to read their stories. They do it because they get money for it. Hopefully at some point soon this type of "journalism" dies down.
I detest the guy for other reasons. I think he's a twat. However, do you truly believe that he's a neo nazi? Does anyone? Probably not. His firing was one of virtue signaling, nothing more. I think virtue signaling is far more harmful to society than some moron's stupid jokes.
That was the first PewDiePie I've watched, and it's interesting to see the media do to him what they've done to Trump, Farage, Wilders, Le Pen, Orban, etc. The media no longer report the truth, they report their own narrative. They fabricate evidence in an effort to influence people's views.
The media used to be able to control the narrative, but having lost control they're redoubling their efforts to control what people think, which means more attacks against people they disagree with and more fabrications. This is having the opposite effect, and is only serving to turn more people away from the mainstream media.
Traditional media knows it's in trouble but appears to be so out of touch with the public that it doesn't know what to do about it, so the attacks, the lies and the fabrications continue. The sooner the media collapses, the better.
But a very carefully targeted one. The people who get ridiculed have to really deserve the dickish treatment. You can take a cheap shot, but you can never punch down.
Now I've seen the infamous video and I totally get it. It's a good point, but it totally fails as satire because he ended up screwing with, and then harming the guys in the video, who almost certainly have no idea the significance of what they're doing. How many Jews are in India? About five thousand individuals out of a billion. Zoroastrians are almost 30 times more common in the US as Jews are in India, particularly rural India.
Now he's totally right that the media is stupid, block-headed and hypocritical, and has neither the ability nor inclination to understand him. But that doesn't change the fact he attempted satire and failed. That makes him, at least in this incident, just a dick.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Context is everything and lacking context your statement is a lie. The guy made a couple satires based on claims of him being a , not a normal staple on his channel. The allegation was that since some white racist like him he must be racist. That beauty should sound familiar right? By the way, some Muslim extremist likes your post, so you have to be a homophobic anti-Semite.
The "take offense at everything" generation has ensured that the overwhelming majority of comedians will not perform on a Campuses. But hey, enjoy Amy Schumer shows ever week because a white chick insulting men and pretending to be a slut is comedy everyone can enjoy for an eternity right?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
He may well be a troll. Entirely possible. But the videos I've thus far seen were not of a trollish cast, and the "Death to All Jews" one in particular is not remotely anti-semitic. If you genuinely believe it to be so, you may be from an actual intellectual, emotional or perceptual disorder of some sort.
This latest response is perfectly timed, just as the flames were dying down he fans them and gets another round of attention.
If this is the current state of the media, if this is the sort of hyperbole we're going to be subjected to for the next four years, if this is the new McCarthyism, then these are flames that need flaming, be it by trolls or non-trolls.
On a personal note here: it's not like I really fear some totalitarianism of the left, either. I don't think they can win this war... not in America, anyway. But I do rather fear the consequences of proving Trump right, of validating the echo chambers of tens of millions of people who were right-leaning fence sitters until they saw the proof stack up that the mainstream media really is full of hysterical, baldfaced lies.
Has it always been *this* bad? Fuck me, I'd better stop before I start saying "woke".
Why is fucking 'PewDiePie' even showing up on Slashdot? Again. There was an article about him just a couple of days ago. Nobody. Fucking. Cares about this asshole. Can we please give it a rest?
Not really. Gawker was trashy clickbait, and they had no right to oust a gay person or publish private sex tapes. I'm as leftist as you can get, and can acknowledge that.
Doesn't make Breitbart any better. It's basically borderline racist, right-wing Gawker.
Submitter here. And the gloves are off, FYI.
This is a bizarre little trick, apparently some weird leftover piece of Cold War propaganda, that any time a topic has anything to do with the free market you can point that out and a significant minority of people will believe you've just "won" the discussion and will mod you up, even if you're rambling irrelevant drivel. (It works on Reddit, too.)
Congratulations, Disney and Youtube are legally free to do as they choose. No, the first amendment doesn't constrain them. Are we done with the kindergarten version of Civics now?
There appears to be widespread *lying* about the nature of the videos in question, characterizations that are so brazen as to be actual lies by mainstream media organizations like the Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Independent, etc. This is on top of the WSJ actually going out of their way to get PewDiePie "fired" by mining and editing his content and then sending it directly (from my understanding) to Disney.
I think that alone is all worth talking about. If dishonest and manipulative newspapers don't interest you at all, well there's the door. Bye.
But there's even more: to the extent that companies like Youtube and Disney are being pressured by asshats writing letters and threatening boycotts, I'd even go so far as to say it's worth discussing trying to pressure them in the opposite direction. Not because I'm a huge PewDiePie fan (I'm not; I've watched only a few of his videos), but because the internet is being dominated by a small group of companies and it's worth a little effort to push back now, while we still can, and inform them that free speech for their platform (not just our constitution) is what we actually want.
Just listen to this smug shit coming out of the WSJ and put that in the context of the thousands of Youtubers trying to figure out Youtube's uncodified content policy so their videos won't be de-monetized. Put that in the contest of the millions of Youtube users who just want their favorite hosts to be able to speak their mind uncensored. The WSJ doesn't care about all of that. They only care about media giants being able to dictate acceptable content with an iron fist.
Does that violate the first amendment? Again, no. Is this capitalism at work? Again, yes. You're such a good, smart little anti-Communist for reminding us of these things!
But us talking about it and getting a bit pissed about it and wondering aloud if there's any way to pull the brake on this shitshow before it gets any worse is also capitalism at work. If that's a conversation that doesn't interest you--there's the door. Vote with your feet, citizen.
> He is apparantly suprised that broadcasting a sign with "Death To All Jews" on it would get him fired.
Actually, he's surprised that his other video about the media taking things out of context would itself be taken out of context to prove that he was some kind of Nazi.
Even in the original video, in which he was dismayed to find out that someone would actually do those things for a few bucks, he says that he's not proud of this and apologizes to the viewers because he didn't think the people he hired on Fiverr would actually do those things.
But I bet you didn't actually look at any of that, and now the videos are marked as private. The best I can find now is this discussion by a friend of his.
This is akin to bitching that you don't like Snowden because he wears ugly glasses and has a boring face.
I'm the submitter. I don't watch PewDiePie videos. I think I watched only two in my entire life before today. This is serious news. He is the biggest name on Youtube (like it or not), and these are some of the biggest names in mainstream news lying about him, engaging in an open campaign to get him fired (WSJ went directly to Disney, from my understanding), and then they casually, lazily, openly discuss about how their motive in all of this was that they want to see online media giants dictate acceptable content with an iron fist instead of this willy-nilly free speech bullshit that makes old media nervous.
When the hell did Slashdot turn into goddamn TMZ? Who cares who you like or don't like? This. Matters.
He may well be a troll. Entirely possible. But the videos I've thus far seen were not of a trollish cast, and the "Death to All Jews" one in particular is not remotely anti-semitic. [trimmed ad hominem attack]
I didn't say he was anti-semitic, I don't believe that he is. I said that he is an attention whore. The entire reason he asked for THAT phrase to be written was to get a reaction.
If he was truly horrified by what he and they did, as he claimed in the video, he could have solved the problem by simply not posting the video. Instead he posted it and got waves of free publicity.
This is part of a campaign:
You're missing the point. It's not about some vlogger we've never heard of. It's about the mainstream media being caught in a lie. Again. As if we needed more evidence after the disgraceful election coverage.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
... in that I never heard of it before and don't give a shit now that I have.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Infowars? Breitbbart?
Sarah Silverman once went on Conan dressed up as Hitler, complete with stache and Swastika. That's a bit more than a sign.
"Ah, but that's different, she was obviously doing it to make a point."
So was PewDiePie.
I'm sorry, but were you responding to the parent, or the grandparent, some idiot called x0ra, who wrote:
BTW you do know Ben Shapiro no longer works for Breitbart, right? He quit a year or so ago, when Breitbart started defending senior Trump staff when they assaulted Breitbart's own reporters.
Here's Shapiro on the alt-right. Amongst the choice quotes are:
So FWIW, one of the two people you mention actually strongly supports the notion that Breitbart is controlled by anti-semites. The other, Yiannopoulos, incidentally, isn't proof of anything: he's attacked his own sexuality before, and he's rejected his jewish roots.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
PewDiePie's being about "it's fine to be an antisemitic little shithead"
I think his point was more that it's trivially easy to make other people act like antisemitic little shitheads. He paid $5, and he got at least two people to make a video that (were it their honest opinion) would rightly earn them wide condemnation. Yet no one's even commenting on those two dudes - they were clearly 'just following orders.' Doing the necessary to pay their bills and probably don't really believe their sign.
His point was that it takes very little to get people to openly proclaim beliefs they don't hold. Especially on the internet. (I assume those two guys would want more than $5 to hold up their sign outside a synagogue, for example.) Ask yourself how much it would cost to get you to add "Hail Satan," "I'm totally gay for DJT," or "People like PewDiePie deserve to die" to your facebook page. Or to film yourself saying those things to strangers in Times Square. You don't have to be serious about the statements, just to use those exact words so that someone else can use them out of context.
There's a saying in Texas: "All hat and no cattle." And yet, "all hat" keeps winning, even when it's losing. Because the Twitter/Youtube economy is about clicks and views, regardless if you find the content compelling or appalling. Trump got the White House in part because his Tweets got him so much free publicity - news media making his Tweets into front-page stuff while his GOP opponents wasted their time and money trying to go it old-school. Now, people like me who'd never heard or cared about PewDiePie are all reading about him on Wired.com for the first time, amazed at his epic rise and fall as a juvenile asshole, doing on the Internet what would otherwise get him smacked in the face until he learns his lesson and stops... all that really matters is how every click records something about you on a server somewhere, and makes somebody a buck.
This is fucking ridiculous. We are all getting Played, and the Players are studying all this carefully and perfecting the craft... for pay.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
You really need to learn to condense your responses and stop rambling.
Shut up, twatwaffle.
Pro Palestine does not equal anti Jew.
It may equal anti-zionist but then liberals tend to be anti-nationalism period. That includes Jewish Nationalism as much as it does, say, American nationalism.
Hell, I personally know quite a lot of anti-Israel, pro-palestine Jews who would be terribly offended at the suggestion that by virtue of their ethnicity they are compelled to be in favor of an appartheid regime that denies basic human rights to a vast population, and who actually support either full and equal rights for Palestinians in Israel or a Palestinian state free of Israeli control.
Did you think all Jewish people today would still believe what their grandparents believed 70 years ago? That an ethnic homeland is a fundamental pre-requisite to freedom ? The liberals have long stopped believing that in general - and Jewish liberals tend to agree. At least, those under 40 do.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
His point was that it takes very little to get people to openly proclaim beliefs they don't hold.
And that needed to be proven, because.... ? Or is this just one of those bullshit "social experiments" where Youtubers get to act like assholes because they're holding a camera to record what happens?
Youtube is a cesspit of wannbes trying to outdo each other in shock value, while avoiding getting banned by Youtube, all for the views. PewDiePie was just another one playing the game, but he got burned. He paid people desperate for money to do something stupid, and then pretends to be shocked that they actually did it. That way he gets to claim he's not really responsible, while being the one who conceived it, paid for it, videoed it, uploaded it and collected the ad revenue.
Quite different points though. Sarah Silverman's point being about the grotesquery of Trump, and PewDiePie's being about "it's fine to be an antisemitic little shithead"
No, his point for the clip that was taken out of context was:
* "Youtube Heroes is an Authoritarian nightmare that is going to attract the worst kinds of people."
* "The media likes to take things out of context to slander people."
* "Hey, there's a thing over here that I'm pointing at."
* "This fiverr website is a great example of how surreal the modern world is."
Depending on which of the clips they took out of context you're talking about, of course.