YouTube has canceled the second season of irreverent Swedish vlogger PewDiePie’s reality show and is pulling his channel from their premium advertising program following a controversy over videos featuring anti-Semitic jokes.
The announcement comes only hours after Disney’s Makers Studios also said it was distancing itself from the YouTuber —who reportedly makes $12 million a year performing weird skits on camera—after a review of his channel by the Wall Street Journal found it rife with Nazi and anti-Jewish messaging and imagery.
In a statement to Variety, a YouTube spokesperson said, “We’ve decided to cancel the release of ‘Scare PewDiePie’ season 2 and we’re removing the PewDiePie channel from Google Preferred.” Google Preferred is the search engine’s premium advertising program for selling top “brand-safe content” on YouTube.
PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is one of YouTube’s most popular bloggers, with over 53 million adoring fans regularly tuning in to his channel.
Revered for his brazen style and profanity-laced videos mostly centered around gaming, Pew DiePie began amassing a massive audience in 2013, when he broadcast his first video.
Collectively, his channel has received over 16 billion views.
With such a huge following, PewDiePie was quickly approached by entertainment giants eager to reach his millennial audience and strike lucrative deals, including Disney and Google’s YouTube.
In early 2016, Disney’s Makers Studio gifted Kjellberg with his own YouTube network, Revelmode, for which he had carte blanche to program whatever he wanted. Revelmode covers video games, music and entertainment and featured other popular YouTubers, such as Kwebbelkop, EmmaBlackery and Dodge.
But PewDiePie sparked a storm in January after he paid two men on Tel-Aviv based Fivver (a website where people are paid a pittance to do random jobs) and dared them to unravel a banner with an anti-Semitic message in a video watched by 6.6 million people.
In the YouTube clip, two scantily clad South Asian men can be seen flaunting a banner bearing the words “Death to All Jews” while dancing and laughing.
The duo ran a business called “Funny Guys” on Fiverr and performed the stunt for a few dollars.
“I don’t feel too proud of this, I’m not going to lie,” Kjellberg said in the video at the time. But he denied being anti-Semitic and said it was simply a funny prank that he didn’t think would work.
According to the Journal, PewDiePie has posted eight other videos since August that include anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery. They included a clip from a Hitler speech, a post of swastikas drawn by his fans, and him watched a Hitler video in a brown military uniform, the paper reported
PewDiePie’s case illustrates the wider issue of companies partnering with irreverent and provocative Internet personalities whose brash style and endorsement by fringe right-wingers (in this case, neo-Nazi websites) may ultimately be damaging to those companies’ images.
A spokeswoman for Disney’s Makers Studios told the Journal that under their arrangement Kjellberg had free rein over the channel’s content, but that in this case he had clearly gone “too far.”
“Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent … the resulting videos are inappropriate,” he said.
PewDiePie is not unfamiliar with controversy. He is famous for regularly tweeting fake news about himself (such as falsely announcing that he would delete his channel when it reached 50 million users) and came twice under fire recently: for using the N-word in one of his clips, and changing his Twitter profile picture to a phallic image, resulting in his account being briefly suspended.
