The most successful video blogger was accused of sympathy for the Nazis. Pewdiepie is protected, apologizes and attacks

The Swede Felix Chelberg, known as the video blogger Pewdiepie, is undergoing a difficult public crisis. Disney refused to cooperate with him; YouTube has ceased to actively promote his videos. The reason for this was the jokes of Chelberg, which many considered anti -Semitic - video blogger is accused of sympathy for Nazism. On the evening of February 16, Pewdiepie answered in detail to critics, explained his position and apologized, and at the same time attacked the mainstream media. Medusa tells what is happening with the most successful video blogger in the world.

Felix Chelberg has been leading his channel on Yetube for six years. It became popular thanks to the flights - videos in which Pewdiepie plays different video games, emotionally commenting on what is happening and jokes a lot, including using obscene vocabulary and phrases that would have seemed unconvineed to many. Especially Chelberg succeeds in Horror-Igr flyer. However, it is not limited to the passage and releases the video on the very topics - from Valentine's day to the methodology for calculating the popularity of the channel on the UTUB.

The audience loves Chelberg for the fact that he is “real”: he has no patrons; He is not supported by a team of producers, scriptwriters and operators; He says that he thinks, not embarrassed in expressions - and is not much different from his spectators. “I’m just a dude from Sweden who loves to laugh and force other people to laugh,” Pewdiepie describes himself as he describes.

Chelberg is extremely successful: now his channel has 53 million subscribers, his videos are collected by millions and tens of millions of views (in total, more than 14 billion times were watched). Chelberg’s video became the “industry standard” for tens of thousands of imitators around the world. He earns $ 15 million annually: these are advertising deductions, income from his own mobile game, sales of a book and other things. In 2016, Pewdiepie was on the list of the most influential people in the world according to Time magazine.

Chelberg began to dramatically gain popularity in 2013, when the press noticed him: the article about the video blogger came out even in The New York Times. In early 2013, he had five million subscribers, in November of the same year, the Pewdiepie channel became the most popular on Utube (with 15 million subscribers). Shortly before that, he signed a contract with the Maker Studios studio, a Disney division, which is engaged in the production of popular video for YouTube.

Calberg’s comedic manner was repeatedly criticized. For example, in the early videos, he joked about rape - but then he apologized and announced that he was aware of his mistake and would not do this anymore. Recently, Pewdiepie has cut off on the topic of Nazism; I put on a cap with the slogan of Donald Trump Make America Great Again-and in general sometimes behaved like an alt-right troll with 4chan. It is not surprising that there are many fans of Chelberg among the Alt-right; One of the most popular sites of the “alternative right” The Daily Stormer even joked himself to the Pewdiepie fan page.

According to Chelberg himself, his audience perfectly read the irony and did not take jokes seriously, but the journalists have repeatedly wrote that Pewdiepie is a racist. Chelberg refuted this again and again, at the same time criticizing the media and accusing them of bias (and that they tear out quotes from context).

In the December video , entitled “I am a racist?”, Pewdiepie said that newspapers lie, accusing him of racism, do not understand jokes and simply distort the facts: for example, they convict him of publishing a swastika, although in reality we are talking about a video where the blogger asks his fans not to draw Nazi symbols in his mobile game. The video with the refutations ends like this: Chelberg puts on a form similar to a Nazi, and looks at Hitler's speech. Recently, there were especially many statements on this subject: say, on February 5, in the next video, he raised his hand in a Nazi greeting, accompanying the gesture with the inscription "Nazi, confirmed."

The most negative reaction was caused by another video in which Chelberg explores the Fiverr service-a kind of labor exchange, where you can ask the service user to do something for five dollars. Pewdiepie first asked for a man dressed as Jesus to pronounce the phrase “Hitler did nothing wrong”, and then invited two hinds to dance with a sign in the hands on which “Death to all Jews” was written. The video came out in mid -January. Chelberg explained that in this way he demonstrated “the readiness of people for money to do anything”, and also ridiculed the meaninglessness of the service. From a negative reaction, this did not protect him.

On February 14, it became known that Maker Studios stops working with his main celebrity, and YouTube canceled the show with Chelberg on his paid YouTube Red service and stopped showing Pewdiepie in the recommended video block. In total, journalists counted nine videos in which Pewdiepie admits anti -Semitic or racist jokes; Three of them, including the same January video, are deleted.

On February 16, when Chelberg in the eyes of the press turned into the main Nazi Yetuub, he published an 11-minute video “My answer”. In the video, Chelberg admits that he really “went too far” with a joke about Jews. He says that he did not know what effect his ironic statements made among the “alternative right”. Chelberg also criticizes The Wall Street Journal, which published a note on the breakdown of Disney and Pewdiepie. Journalists, Cherberg reasoned, chose him with their target and purposefully tried to cause him maximum damage, revising the sake of this hundreds of videos and choosing moments that can be interpreted as sympathy for the Nazis. It was they, who believes the blogger, showed a selection of such moments Disney (the company owns Maker Studios) and thus forced to break off relations - and then released the material about it.

“Is there any hatred in what I am doing? No. Personally, I think that it is they [journalists] that normalize hatred. <...> I am still here, still making a video. Good attempt, The Wall Street Journal. Try it again, shit, ”said Chelberg.

According to Forbes, the consequences of breaking up relationships with Disney and YouTube (video service now does not promote Pewdiepie rollers), will reduce Pewdiepie annual income - from $ 15 million to seven.

Pavel Borisov