Though belonging to any one of these groups doesn’t make somebody alt-right, it does create a scenario where they’re more frequently exposed to alt-right rhetoric.
Though he’s known primarily within the gaming community, PewDiePie has fingers in all of these pies, and thus frequently unites them into a loosely affiliated group of YouTubers known for their irreverence, love of trolling and irony, and commitment to doubling down hard on jokes and memes. On one side of the fight to defend PewDiePie lie many overlapping subcultures which make up huge swaths of YouTube’s general populations: its tremendous gaming communities, including Let’s Play-ers, livestreamers, machinima-style editors, and vloggers its prank cultures and their overlap with stunt personalities like Jake and Logan Paul and its increasingly insidious alt-right presence. PewDiePie resides at the center of what seems to be a growing divide between YouTube subcultures
But in a broader sense, both fights are rooted in the idea of what constitutes YouTube culture itself - and they represent the many complicated layers of community on YouTube in 2018. In a narrower sense, both fights are examples of the considerable level of influence that PewDiePie holds over his 76 million followers (and counting). The other involves an attempt to prevent his channel from being deposed as the most-subscribed channel on the site. One of their two battles involves an attempt to punish YouTube for omitting PewDiePie from its 2018 “Rewind” video, which aims to commemorate the most celebrated and meaningful aspects of YouTube’s community throughout the year. (PewDiePie has not responded to a request from Vox for comment.) But his followers seem unphased by the controversy, and have devoted themselves to defending his honor from perceived slights and threats to his YouTube sovereignty. PewDiePie, has lately made the news for recommending an anti-Semitic YouTube channel in one of his videos. YouTube’s most popular vlogger is currently at the center of two massive and memeified wars being waged in his name - and they represent a battle for the soul of the platform itself.įelix Kjellberg, a.k.a.
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