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Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

The pewdiepie controversy seems manufactured to me.

I get pewdiepies humor. I watch his videos anticipating his originality and I guess 54 million subs do for varying reasons.

His ability to express himself and generate content that makes me laugh repeatedly. He's not insensitive despite what some news articles say. The anti-semitism thing is so overused today its a little meaningless. The only way to push its worth is to generate headlines and articles to emphasis its importance.

He jokes broadly about every culture and only seems to have issues with one culture in particular, unsurprisingly.

It's reached a point it feels he's holding back something funny to please WSJ - a huge, huge tragedy and loss to his freedom and originality.

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Ultimately, his freedom and originality haven't been impinged; if he wants to say whatever he wants, he can make and host his own videos.

His freedom of speech doesn't override Disney's freedom of association or YouTube's freedom of the press; they're under no obligation to publish or promote anyone's content, and the counterweight to that is that people who don't like their policies can boycott them.

But you're unlikely to find a successful boycott organized around the notion that there should be no ramifications for paying strangers to hold up signs that say "Death To All Jews."

This is all correct -- but it underlines the awkward moral spot that Google (my employer) is in.

Our incentive is to pay lip service to freedom of speech while taking the path of least resistance and censor to keep angry 3rd parties happy. You might think this shuts down only speech beyond the pale. But we are still rewarding those who act most offended, and our wisest course is to kowtow more and more.

That stuff is no danger to a society when the soap boxes are distributed about land. But YouTube is a single platform in the position where it can one of the most effective censors of film on earth.

It is more more powerful in this field than any government, -- except those which can force our hand. Yet Google has the rights, and indeed duties of a private company. And that is a long-term danger to society and to the company.

If we stopped saying things that might "offend" someone somewhere there would be silence. What's interesting is, the more we try to silence certain voices, the louder their message gets. Does demonization (?) work? Does it back fire ? Take IS for instance. The stronger and more extreme the resistance (?) the stronger it gets.

I'm certainly not defending hate, etc. Just wondering - out loud - if the old countermeasure rules still apply.

There are things that are pretty unlikely to offend, things that are very likely to offend a lot of people, and things that are very likely to offend a few people (this kind of humor is often called "punching down" when the few are a low-power group and "punching up" when it's a high-power group).

Nobody is calling for zero offense; that's a slippery-slope argument that doesn't really apply to the situation. And nobody has silenced PewDiePie; he's completely free to continue to publish his content on YouTube (with proper community flagging, within the guidelines of the YouTube community, and even if he were no longer free to do so, he wouldn't be "silenced;" he'd just have to move his content to .mp4s hosted out of his own pocket).

What has happened is YouTube and Disney have both exercised their option to no longer pay the guy for being offensive, which they are perfectly within their rights to do.

In terms of the more general "Just wondering aloud" question: The old Streisand Effect is still in play, but the Internet is now a mature enough platform that it has "these sites" and "those sites." You can find all manner of things completely unacceptable to YouTube's community standards linked off of 4chan. Keeping them off of YouTube does probably make them a little harder for most web users to find (since YouTube's search, indexing, and relational systems are so convenient). That's likely working as intended.

Agreed. They are free to hire and fire whoever they want. But that's not my point. The question is this: Does marginalizing and demonizing - in the internet era - make fringe ideas weaker or stronger? Or is "there's no such thing as bad press" finally not true?

Could you explain what you see as the 'moral spot' exactly?

Helping people say anti-semitic stuff doesn't seem like an inspirational position. Isn't the greater danger to society acceptance of intolerance?

> It's reached a point it feels he's holding back something funny to please WSJ - a huge, huge tragedy and loss to his freedom and originality.

On the contrary. Its completely acceptable for PDP to say whatever he hell he wants. The problem is that he wants to be paid by Disney while doing it.

The USA has freedom of speech. PDP is legally allowed to say whatever he wants. Unfortunately, PDP's revenue stream is (or perhaps... was...) Disney. And Walt Disney did not like PDP's Jew jokes.

There's no censorship here. This is PDP losing a financial sponsor / financial backer. Welcome to the real world PDP, your sponsors actually care about what you say.

---------

Wall Street Journal can do whatever. People have made fun of PDP all the time in the past years. That's not what's hurting him right now. Its the loss of Disney as a sponsor.

What's interesting is ignoring his audience that identifies his sense of humor and understands the context of 'Death to all Jews'.

He wants what most people want, to make a living and Disney withdrawing as sponsor will likely not hurt. A bigger issue is WSJ and co efforts to have his ads pulled altogether.

Oh noes! Newspapers are talking about him!

You know the WSJ has absolutely no power over advertisers, aside from the SAME freedom of speech powers that PDP has.

WSJ definitely has the power to ruin your reputation overnight, even if you don't deserve it. You could not do the same to them.

I'll believe it if pdp loses subscribers. For now, it just looks like he lost some sponsors.

Pewdiepie made his money off really really really young audience.. those of you old enough to make up your own judgement/mind and talk about it weren't the ones Disney really cared about.. It's the fact that MILLIONS of young viewers - aged 6+ (probably mostly 8 to 11 years old) watched something that tried to normalize something most kids in that age group shouldn't normalize...

If people feel he was "holding back his freedom" then Disney should NEVER have been a sponsor and WSJ did a service to wake up the community to sponsorship of content creators not creating content for the demographics in which his revenue was being generated.

my 9 year old used to love him, sang "this sammich doesn't have turkey on it" all the freaking time but now won't even admit his existence mostly because kids want to watch youtubers have fun and not hate.. even if its in satire - its not the right demographics..

His content has always been on the "R rating" side and is not intended for children. If showing some people holding up a silly side is the first thing that offended your sensibilities, you haven't been paying attention.

While using the "anti-semitism" label is overused today (I once heard Rush Limbaugh say a Jewish person was an anti-semite), calling someone an anti-semite who had someone hold up a sign that says "Death to all Jews" is not exactly a stretch. When he was making fun of those other cultures, did he say "Death to all _______ (other culture)"?

Holding up a sign that says "Death to all X" is not definitive proof of hatred of X. If so, comedians/satirists are the most hateful group of people to have ever existed.

Would it be illegal for Disney to encourage or indirectly fund a hit piece on PewDiePie? It's very likely the OP here is right: YouTubers are imploding. Disney probably is the first to see that(they acquired Maker Studios a year or so ago) and needed to offload a massive failing asset.

The anti-semitism problem is a very specific angle to take particularly related to Disney and PewDiePie. Someone clearly combed his trove of videos and found every single Nazi reference; seem like a stretch to begin with. Idk theories.

Is it really that surprising that Disney thought that using "death to all Jews" in a joke, regardless of context, was inappropriate?

"regardless of context" does not even exist. Your comment featured it and I don't think it's an inappropriate comment you made here.

"Death to all jews" -crooked-v 3/27/17

I think I saw another person say it, cloakanddagger or something like that...

"Death to all" - cloakandswagger -v 3/27/17

Clearly the writings of a deranged individual.

Replying to myself, since I can not edit it anymore.

I know it sounds all funny and stuff, but if someone is curious about how context, in this case at least the statements exposed curator pewdiepie, matters, Foucaults 1969 essay "What Is an Author?" is a great starting point to dig into:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_an_Author%3F

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