On November 10, two days after the election of Donald Trump, Googlers gathered for an all-staff meeting. Sergey Brin, who had long been absent from daily Google affairs, emceed onstage. “As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do, too,” Brin said. “It’s a very stressful time and conflicts with many of our values.”
Larry Page came up to stand beside him. Both billionaires had salt-and-pepper beards and held mics with foam covers that matched their shirts. They invited onstage a quartet of senior executives who were actually running Google. This included Sundar Pichai, Page’s successor as CEO, a lanky, bespectacled product specialist and former consultant who was born in India and remarkably free from enemies inside Google. Employee Q&A began. Brin read off one question raising concerns that the algorithms of YouTube and social networks were polarizing people, making them “blind to what the other half of the world thinks.” What could Google do? Pichai, in a stylish hoodie, reassured his staff that such questions were being asked at the highest ranks, but he wanted to see more “data-based and empirical work” on the topic first. Google still delivered information to the masses, he went on. “But I don’t think it’s reaching certain people at all,” he added. More questions came in. Occasionally, Google’s founders chimed in to punctuate a response, as when Brin offered, “Data suggests that boredom led to the rise of fascism and also the communist revolution.” He paused, searching for the right words. “It sort of sneaks up sometimes, you know. Really bad things.” Later, video footage of this meeting leaked to Breitbart News, held up as evidence of Google’s bias against conservatives, a charge that would dog the company moving forward.
The next day YouTube staff convened for their weekly meeting in a courtyard dotted with eucalyptus trees. Live music usually played after the official presentation, once snacks and microbrews were carted in. Not this time. Instead, everyone went through a dazed and confused postmortem similar to that at Google’s meeting. At one point an employee stood up to ask a question or at least make a point. The employee had analyzed data from the channels that uncritically cheered Trump, such as Alex Jones, under the guise of commentary or punditry. Bundled together, they had more watch time than legitimate news outlets on YouTube. This is a crisis, the staffer pleaded.
If YouTube brass agreed, they didn’t say so. But a certifiable crisis came soon enough, and YouTube would have no idea what to do.
PewDiePie: “DELETING MY CHANNEL AT 50 MILLION.” December 2, 2016. 10:19.
“Can someone just stop YouTube from their self?” Kjellberg, scruffily bearded, stands in a small sound studio, where a neon sign of his bro-fist is mounted on the wall. He is practicing the budding art of kvetching about his internet home. “I feel like YouTube is a toddler playing with knives. Let’s just take the knife away from that baby!” His issue, we learn, is a malfunction for his subscribers, who aren’t seeing his videos. His YouTuber friends are affected, too. YouTube clearly changed something but didn’t tell anyone. And his views are down; some daily vlogs barely cross two million. “That’s unheard of for me.” Jump cut. “YouTube is trying to kill my channel.” He will first. Once he crosses fifty million subscribers, he will pull the plug.
He did not. That threat ended up being a promotional gimmick for the second season of Scare PewDiePie, his YouTube Originals show. But the Lear rage from YouTube’s king was genuine. A person who worked with him described the previous months as the “darkest” they had seen. The content grind had worn Kjellberg thin. At the start of the year, he launched his own YouTube network under Maker Studios, called Revelmode, gathering fellow YouTubers to shoot videos and run charity drives. He juggled that with Scare PewDiePie filming in Los Angeles and his own grueling production schedule. (Later, Kjellberg would tell fans he developed a daily whiskey-drinking habit to cope with the stress.) Maker pushed Kjellberg to extend his brand; he authored a paperback and began work on another YouTube series. Viacom called, offering him a Comedy Central show, but he turned them down, preferring to stick with YouTube. Time named him one of the hundred most influential people of 2016, posting a photo of him clad in a tuxedo at a red-carpet Star Wars premiere.
As Kjellberg floated closer to the mainstream, PewDiePie went further in the other direction. Starting in 2015, he grew bored with video games and transferred his shtick of playing patently absurd games into meta-commentary on the patent absurdity of the internet. His gaming videos, full of teenage boy humor, already toed the line of respectability. (His titles included “RUN LIKE YOU HAVE DIARRHEA,” “THE GREAT HAND JOB,” and many with the word “boobs.”) When Kjellberg, like other YouTubers, began to feel the platform move under his feet as its systems tilted toward “ad-friendly” material and daily vlogging, he mocked that effort in the same spirit. His vlogging mixed earnest schmaltz (“ANNIVERSARY!”) with inanity (“DRINKING PISS FOR VIEWS,” “I TRY POOP CANDY!” “I’M SO DONE”). Several videos he posted lamented the backwater of YouTube comments, a fair gripe. His complaint about subscriber glitches was also legitimate. YouTube, concerned about dormant and fake subscribers, had started cleaning up subscription counts but suffered a technical glitch and, the company later admitted, didn’t communicate this well with creators. The sudden influx of TV networks accustomed to daily output placed YouTubers at a clear disadvantage under a system that craved daily views. (MatPat, the “theorist” YouTuber, made an animated video pointing this out that December, showing YouTubers tumbling off a treadmill while logos for TV talk shows jogged gamely ahead.)
Despite Kjellberg’s mastery of the “Let’s Play” format, in this era he consciously displayed a disregard for YouTube’s algorithmic logic. No one was searching for poop candy or ways to drink piss. So his views dropped.
But Kjellberg stuck with his shtick, either to please his core audience or as comedic preference. He worshipped South Park, whose 2015 and 2016 seasons ribbed both PC culture and Trumpian bombast with a characteristic nihilism. (Trump and Clinton were portrayed respectively as a “giant douche” and a “turd sandwich.”) South Park had a running gag about a Jewish character, which managed (debatably) to satirize cultural undercurrents of antisemitism. Online, though, this brand of comedy lost its polish and nuance. The alt-right and Breitbart army eagerly hurled insults and invective, while a brigade of online “shitposters” turned Pepe, a cartoon frog, into a hate symbol and often masked or excused their tactics as jokes. Some trolled for sheer thrills, while others were more politically calculating, a modern version of Nixon’s “rat-fucking” fixers. “Like Trump’s statements,” the TV critic Emily Nussbaum would write, “their quasi-comical memeing and name-calling was so destabilizing, flipping between serious and silly, that it warped the boundaries of ordinary discourse.”
The shitposters’ cousins were the “edgelords,” members of a web subculture who posted taboo topics to make some point or simply because they could. Kjellberg embraced the edgelords, online and off. A former colleague recalled him joking in person about them being Jewish, like a kid tossing around the word “fag.” On his channel PewDiePie reviewed “dank memes” and the topsy-turvy viral internet of Trump’s candidacy. “YouTube at that time was a place where no one really knew where the limit was,” Kjellberg later recalled. “A lot of channels were just pushing it as far as possible because there were no restrictions at the time.” From the outside it was hard to tell what he actually believed.
Despite his antics, he seemed dedicated to preserving YouTube’s integrity (or at least his vision of it). Many YouTubers felt the algorithm begin to put more weight on likes and comments as signs of engagement, evident in videos of boorish (mostly male) creators demanding viewers “Smash that Like button!” That December, Kjellberg spoofed this trend, flailing around his house shirtless, ranting about likes. For a brief moment while assuming this histrionic character, he threw up what looked like a Nazi salute.
Many who worked with Kjellberg insisted that he had no animosity or hateful beliefs. They described him as steadfastly loyal to his YouTube audience. (One person called him “a little spectrumy” in this monomania.) “He’s a very kind person,” said David Sievers, the early Maker Studios official. “Like many artists, he has an art. And like comedians who are practicing an art, not everyone gets it.” In his videos Kjellberg slipped in and out of his “PewDiePie voice”—a gravelly shriek born in his gaming days. In one video, Kjellberg speculated that YouTube, the company, wanted to unseat him because he was a white man. While discussing Lilly Singh, a female creator of color whom YouTube’s marketing had promoted, Kjellberg deployed the voice, imitating a conspiracy theorist. “I’m white. Can I make that comment?” he said. “But I do think that’s a problem.” This, Kjellberg explained in a follow-up video, was clearly an edgy joke.
The following month he tipped over the edge.
He had started a series of videos about Fiverr, an online gig-economy service that hired people to perform tasks for $5. Kjellberg wanted to see how far the service would go.
In one video he did his usual internet-commentary routine: he shared his screen with viewers and showed his reaction to its contents in real time. The screen showed a Fiverr account he had hired called the “Funny Guys,” two young men from rural India. While laughing, the Funny Guys unfurled a paper scroll on-screen that read, death to all jews. Kjellberg covered his mouth in shock. Seconds ticked by. For a moment regret appeared. “I am sorry. I didn’t think they would actually do it,” Kjellberg said. “I don’t feel too proud of this. I’m not going to lie. Like, I’m not anti-Semitic.” He slipped back into the PewDiePie voice. “It was a funny meme. I didn’t think it would work.”
Still, he posted the video.
Later that month the Trump White House sent out a strange statement: a Holocaust Remembrance Day message, with no mention of Jews. Civil society groups criticized the obvious slight. Others wondered aloud if this was intentional, a coded message to an extreme fringe aligned with the new president. A reporter for The Wall Street Journal was curious about how this was being received on the far right and went to The Daily Stormer, an openly neo-Nazi web forum. There at the top of the website was a familiar face: blond, blue-eyed, Swedish. The Daily Stormer was advertising itself as the “#1 PewDiePie fan site.” What was the biggest YouTuber doing on a neo-Nazi website?
Reporters at the newspaper dug through The Daily Stormer to find nine different PewDiePie clips that the site had highlighted as videos supporting its cause. This included the January video and another from a Fiverr clip Kjellberg had shown, where a man in a Jesus costume said, “Hitler did nothing wrong.” Kjellberg occasionally used Hitler footage and Nazi imagery in his videos when pointing out some absurdity online. Another post on The Daily Stormer praised Kjellberg’s haircut and clothing as coded fascist attire. The Journal prepared a story on the unsettling oddity of neo-Nazis endorsing a celebrity on the payrolls of Google and Disney. They tried repeatedly to reach Kjellberg for comment, and went to Disney and YouTube on Friday, February 10.
From there everything moved quickly, setting off a chain reaction that permanently changed YouTube and its biggest star’s career.
That Sunday, Kjellberg released a short personal blog entry intended to bury the controversy. With the Fiverr clip, he wrote, he was “trying to show how crazy the modern world is.” He admitted he had offended viewers but claimed it was unintentional, and he did not apologize. “I think of the content that I create as entertainment,” the star wrote. “As laughable as it is to believe that I might actually endorse these people, to anyone unsure on my standpoint regarding hate-based groups: No, I don’t support these people in any way.” This wasn’t enough. Disney wanted a public apology; the company had no interest in having its name in newspapers near any of this. At Maker Studios, Disney’s digital arm, the weekend passed in a chaotic frenzy. It wasn’t even their only PR disaster. (Another Maker star, the early vlogger Shay Carl, publicly confessed his bout with alcoholism and plans to enter rehab on the same day.) Bob Iger, Disney’s chief, made it clear to Maker staff that Disney would stick with Kjellberg if the star apologized for his videos. Kjellberg refused.
Disney went to the Journal with its comment: the studio was ending its commercial deal with PewDiePie. The Journal article—Disney was dropping YouTube’s king—was published late on Monday with a still frame of Kjellberg next to the death to all jews sign. Film editors for Kjellberg’s production studio sat in a house in London slicing footage for his upcoming YouTube show, unaware of the storm. One editor pulled up the coverage online and, according to a person there, expressed the realization aloud: “Well, it looks like this company isn’t going to exist.”
YouTube initially told the newspaper that PewDiePie’s videos didn’t break its rules, arguing that the star was known for pushing the envelope. The company pulled ads on the video referencing Jews, but others The Daily Stormer praised went untouched. Videos “intended to be provocative or satirical” were in the clear while those inciting violence or hatred were not, a spokesperson explained. YouTube did not detail how it distinguished between the two. After the story was published, YouTube announced it was canceling Scare PewDiePie and removing Kjellberg from its premium ads tier.
The whole episode, like the media’s initial circus-freak treatment of his channel, struck Kjellberg as utterly bizarre. When the story landed, on Valentine’s Day, he was staying with his girlfriend at a rented cottage, where he opened Twitter to see a post from J. K. Rowling calling him a fascist. Trump’s election had upended normal conventions of media and discourse and put everyone on edge. Kjellberg, a celebrity since his early twenties who professed an antipathy to politics, either hadn’t read the room or hadn’t heard the dog whistles in his work, perhaps because his audience was so insular. “You’re in this area where everyone is on the same page,” he said in a later interview. He also confessed that he was “pretty irresponsible” in handling the debacle.
At the time, though, he raged.
PewDiePie: “My Response.” February 16, 2017. 11:05.
“It’s almost like two generations of people arguing whether this is okay or not.” Kjellberg unpacks his thoughts out loud in his studio. He does not blame Disney or YouTube. He blames the Journal, faulting it for seeing his satire as anything but. His Fiverr joke offended, sure, but he insists that it had been meant as a joke and so was the other stuff and “This is insane!” As the video rolls, his frustration builds. He mentions the newspaper’s earlier fixation on his earnings. “Old-school media,” he goes on, “does not like internet personalities because they’re scared of us.” He shows the recent Journal article on his screen, zooming in on the bylines. “I’m still making videos. Nice try, Wall Street Journal.” He holds up his middle finger and sucks it. “Try again, motherfuckers.” Then, tearing up, he thanks the “YouTube community” for its support.
Any meaningful conversations from the episode—how hate groups used, or distorted, pop culture; how two megacorporations profited from, or fueled, irresponsible satire; how jokes worked in the Trump era, or maybe didn’t—were drowned out by the ensuing noise. PewDiePie loyalists (and bandwagon trolls) flooded the Journal reporters online with barbs, digging up information on their families. One reporter discovered that pixelated swastikas could appear in email subject lines. The newspaper had to hire private security after an employee and their family received death threats. A phalanx of YouTubers and fans, already skeptical of the mainstream press, grew even more distrustful.
Pundits wrote dozens of think pieces, but the sharpest take came on YouTube. Matthew Patrick, a.k.a. MatPat, released a video explaining why Felix Kjellberg’s Fiverr stunt failed as comedy. YouTube, by its nature, blurred the lines between performer and persona. “It’s often hard to see where PewDiePie ends and Felix begins,” Patrick observed. And that particular joke’s supposed target—the abject capitalism of the gig economy—carelessly mixed in shock antisemitism without explanation. Also, the joke punched down: a rich white celebrity made two unsuspecting Indian men its butt. “Risky humor needs to be humor done right,” Patrick concluded. “As much as it sucks, words matter, Felix. Especially when you’re reaching an audience of fifty million.”
YouTube, the company, stayed quiet as all this unfolded. Its executives didn’t discuss the episode publicly. Privately, Susanne Daniels, a former MTV executive whom YouTube hired to run its Originals, expressed frustration with Kjellberg’s antics and the delay YouTube’s leaders took in acting. “They moved too slowly and ineffectively,” she said later. Robert Kyncl published a book on YouTube creators later in 2017 that compared Kjellberg’s problems to Ted Danson’s cringey blackface routine from 1993. The YouTuber, Kyncl wrote, “underestimated the responsibility he had as the platform’s most popular ambassador, even if he himself is not a hateful person.” Behind the scenes, however, YouTube tried to salvage any damage to its brand. The company arranged a call with Kjellberg; YouTube’s policy chief, Juniper Downs; and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a prominent Jewish group. During the call ADL staff explained that extremists they tracked used anti-Semitic humor online to justify real violence, and simply casting the material as memes disavowed any responsibility. The group suggested Kjellberg make a public donation or apology to Jewish groups, perhaps a video about tolerance.
One person on the call remembered Kjellberg staying mostly silent, like a bored schoolboy at the principal’s office. Nothing came of the meeting. YouTube’s hands-off approach to its biggest star and its platform were starting to look irretrievably broken. And its brand problems were just beginning.