#pewdiegate

Or the defamation of Felix Kjellberg, AKA PewDiePie. 

First of all, I must say that I do not particularly like PewDiePie, in fact I don’t really care about PewDiePie at all (I even think he has an annoying face) more generally I don’t watch Youtubers, I generally don’t care about Youtubers in the slightest. So this is not a fan speaking, it is me, the same blogger who has defended Charlie Hebdo, the same blogger who has, in the past, defended everyone’s right to make bad, tasteless jokes, and I think it is time for me to do just that yet again today. 

For context (context matters, I will go back to that later), I did not like the joke that started this media vendetta against him. I think the “joke” was unfunny, I think it was offensive and stupid, and I think that maybe publishing it wasn’t very smart. There were other ways he could have made that same joke without using the hurtful sentence that he used and that would have driven that same point home more effectively. It all started when he made a silly video about a website called Fiverr; it is a website where one can propose all kinds of services in exchange of five dollars, and is in fact an interesting look into what people are ready to do on the internet for money (video here, PewDiePie since deleted it from his account). So obviously, as the point of the video he made was to show just how far people were ready to go for a few bucks, he proposed the craziest, most offensive or stupid challenge he could think of. And this is where the fuss started, to two Indians guys who proposed to hold up a sign while dancing in the jungle with whatever the sender requested written on it, he sent the following request: “Death to all Jews, Subscribe to Keemstar”. 

Now, it does sound pretty horrible and very tasteless to say the least, but the context that the press missed is “Subscribe to Keemstar”. Why is this important? Because Keemstar is a YouTuber well known to be a racist, antisemitic bigot and a generally shitty person from what I gathered; and this part of the joke - which the press conveniently decided to cut out and not even mention in their grand honesty - frame the whole issue in a much different light. In an odd way, it is very similar to this drawing Charb once made for Charlie Hebdo, where former French minister Christiane Taubira is depicted as a monkey with the Front National logo plastered next to it. In both cases, Charb and PewDiePie are conveying the same thing, they’re saying “this is what this person / this party thinks like”, and in both cases the joke was targeted at a specific audience who they knew would understand because said audience is aware of who and what it’s referring to. You can agree or disagree about whatever or not this method is effective, about whatever or not it’s a sensitive thing to do, but to say that those people are racist / antisemitic themselves is quite the leap, because if they were, then they wouldn’t be calling out the people who have proven to be those very things in the first place.

This utter disregard for context, paired with a lack sources checking that the press is gleefully engaging in, is the problem. It is the problem because it creates a huge rolling ball of disinformation that never gets fact checked. You have trustworthy papers like the New York Times making an article on it because they read it on the Wall Street Journal, and since they don’t want to fall behind the curve and think that WSJ is trustworthy, they don’t bother to do their own time-consuming researches, then other papers who think the NYT is trustworthy do the same thing.. etc.. etc.. and on and on the disinformation ball rolls.

Nowadays, there is a race for “click baity” headlines happening in internet press that I find rather concerning and that leaves people like PewDiePie horribly slandered. Because it didn’t end there, no, you had otherwise serious papers such as the Wall Street Journal (as mentioned above) take snippets of him innocently pointing to the right out of context in order to accuse him of doing the Nazi salute (yes they went there, see here where he addresses it extensively), take a video of him asking people to stop using the Swastika in games to say that HE was openly displaying it, or even more ridiculously, when he ironically dressed up as a soldier and watched a Hitler speech as a joke at the end of a video that expressed his annoyance at journalists pulling everything out of context... well they somehow managed to PULL THAT EXTRACT OUT OF CONTEXT and tried to use it as “proof” of his bigotry (here for the full video). I mean, how ridiculous is that? It is as if German satirist Jan Böhmermann had his Hitler skit videos (here for instance) pulled as badly out of context when he found himself in hot water for mocking Erdogan a while back (here for the whole story). It would have been just as easy to sell this as “proof” of Jan’s “Hitler worship” to a non-Germanophone audience. 

Another thing that is really getting on my nerves when it comes to the whole PewDiePie mess is that people insist in writing off context as irrelevant, yet again. 

“Well, the people who don’t know who Keemstar is will not get that he was calling him out!” 

I’m sorry but how is that even a valid point? This is Charlie Hebdo all over again in spirit. PewDiePie didn’t broadcast his video for the whole world to see via newly invented telepathic messaging, he posted a video on his YouTube channel. A channel which was and still is intended for his audience; an audience who is plenty aware of who Keemstar is and of what kind of beliefs he holds, and who therefore will have understood what he was getting at from the start. Other Youtubers understood, (including Jewish Youtubers; see here, but also Casey Neistat who extensively tweeted for instance) because they are all part of this community and are all well informed on the issue.

PewDiePie never intended for his video to go beyond this audience, he never intended for it to be decontextualised, the press did that, not him. Look, I can’t stress enough the fact that it is fair to feel hurt, but I also think that it is possible to feel hurt, it is possible to voice it, to argue why it wasn’t very smart of him to do that, and why it’s unhelpful and only normalise something which shouldn’t exist (I think we can all agree on that) without resorting to libels. How does slandering someone helps a cause in any way? It doesn’t, because when you end up caught in a lie (and yes, saying that PewDiePie endorses the use of the Swatsika, for instance, IS a lie, because he never did that, he did the opposite), you will only succeed in demeaning what you are trying to accomplish and end up looking like the boy crying wolf when we all know that antisemitism is real and in need of being fought. 

It is not PewDiePie’s fault if he was decontextualised, he never asked nor intended for that to happen. And to the people who say that he should have known that it could happen, that there was a chance that his video could reach an audience bigger than just his own and therefore that this context doesn’t matter, I ask: is this also valid for cultures and countries other than your own? For instance, are French people not allowed to mercilessly mock and joke about what a huge asshole Dieudonné is because, since he is black, then in the instance that it might cross our borders, it could be seen as racist? Is it the same thing about the FN, are we not allowed to ironise about them? Because Charlie Hebdo did that, and... we all know how that story ended when it did inadvertently end up crossing our borders, and ergo went beyond our national community of people who understood at first glance, because they had the needed context in mind.