YouTube star PewDiePie is under fire for a publishing a controversial video ... again.
In February, the extremely popular Swedish gaming vlogger, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, became the target of massive backlash after months of seeding his videos with Nazi imagery, including one instance where he displayed a sign reading “Death to all Jews.”
Now he has courted controversy by uttering the n-word during a gaming live stream.
The excerpted live stream, which reportedly took place Sunday on YouTube’s gaming-specific subsite, YouTube Gaming, features Kjellberg playing a “last-man-standing” shooter game called Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. In the video, Kjellberg says, “What a fucking ni**er” regarding another, unidentified Battlegrounds player. The incident has reignited debate over whether Kjellberg’s frequent, self-proclaimed “jokes” about anti-Semitism, racism, and Nazi leanings are really jokes at all.
Pewdiepie during nazi scandal: "I'm the victim! The media is making me seem like a racist!"
— Ryan Satin (@ryansatin) September 11, 2017
Months later:
pic.twitter.com/Icxu0zfMUE
The content of the live stream clearly violates YouTube’s hate speech policy, but even though it reportedly aired on YouTube Gaming, it does not currently appear to be hosted on Kjellberg’s Gaming live-stream channel.
Following the previous controversy over his anti-Semitic videos, YouTube canceled Kjellberg’s popular reality show Scare PewDiePie, and the prominent YouTube studio Maker, owned by Disney, canceled its partnership with him as well. He has continued publishing videos to his own YouTube channel since, and offers a subscription tier for his live-stream videos on YouTube Gaming.
In response to the new n-word controversy, some within the gaming industry are proactively trying to distance themselves from PewDiePie. One of them, a developer named Sean Vanaman, has issued DMCA takedowns of all PewDiePie videos in which his games appear — including the popular Firewatch and all other games produced by his creative studio, Campo Santo.
On Twitter, Vanaman spoke out strongly against PewDiePie and urged other developers to follow suit:
He's worse than a closeted racist: he's a propagator of despicable garbage that does real damage to the culture around this industry.
— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) September 10, 2017
Vanaman is referencing PewDiePie’s status as the most popular personality on YouTube, an influence that can’t be overstated. As of his February controversy, PewDiePie had 53 million subscribers, a number that has since risen to 57 million. Just as his supporters defended him in February, insisting along with PewDiePie that the media was taking his string of “satirical” Nazi jokes out of context, many are now arguing that PewDiePie used the N word during the live stream simply because he was “heated” or momentarily upset, and that it bears no greater significance:
Hey, can people stop freaking out over Pewdiepie saying the n-word in a heated gaming moment?
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 10, 2017
Watch, there's gonna be 10 articles about it
A number of his defenders also minimized the controversy by arguing that it was overshadowing the anniversary of 9/11:
lmao its 9/11 and people are more concerned over pewdiepie saying the n word OK
— Spazkid (@Spazkidin3d) September 11, 2017
But the public generally hasn’t bought into such excuses, and longtime PewDiePie detractors as well as former fans have expressed their dismay.
RT if unlike PewDiePie, you don't start randomly screaming racial slurs while playing videogames.
— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) September 10, 2017
PEWDIEPIE WE ALL TRUSTED YOU LMFAO
— ♡♪!? (@SkyWilliams) September 10, 2017
BUT HARD R THO?? DIDNT HAVE ANY OTHER WORD??
ARE THERE EVEN BLACK PPL IN UR CITY
i'm deceased pic.twitter.com/AoLcDtCAqz
The incident comes less than a month after PewDiePie, who has been dogged by arguments that he himself is a white supremacist ever since the February controversy, distanced himself from the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally and related protests that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. However, his initial noncommittal response could be read as a winking embrace of the philosophy behind Unite the Right rather than a self-mocking repudiation of it:
These guys clearly watched one too many pewdiepie vids #charlottsville pic.twitter.com/AARRrMkX7c
— pewdiepie (@pewdiepie) August 12, 2017
After his tweet in response to Charlottesville garnered criticism, Kjellberg distanced himself more explicitly. “I want nothing to do with these people,” he claimed in a video. He went on to insist that he didn’t realize there were “actual Nazis out there” when he had previously made Nazi “jokes.” He then added that Nazi memes weren’t “funny anymore” and that he would no longer be making them.
PewDiePie has yet to make a public statement regarding this weekend’s n-word incident, and neither he nor YouTube has responded to Vox’s requests for comment.
Update: In a YouTube video posted Tuesday morning, Kjellberg apologized for the incident, stating that “in the heat of the moment. I said the worst word I could possibly think of, and it just sort of slipped out,” and that he found his own behavior “extremely immature and stupid.”
“I'm disappointed in myself, because it seems like I've learned nothing from these past controversies,” he added. “It’s not that I think I can say or do whatever I want and get away with it. That’s not it at all — I’m just an idiot.”
“It was not okay. I’m really sorry if I offended, hurt or disappointed anyone with all of this. Being in the position I am, I should know better... I know I can’t keep messing up like this... I owe it to my audience and to myself to do better than this, because I know I’m better than this.”
Kjellberg stated he really wanted to “move forward” by “improv[ing] myself” but did not give specifics about how he would do that.