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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

> The story centres entirely on Kjellberg accidentally throwing a fringe site into a laundry list of other outlets he was seeking to signal-boost.

Poor Pewd! It's sad how these accidents keep happening to him, over and over again. Just bad luck, I guess.

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There also seem to keep being accidents from SPLC, Vox, etc. where they label people as extremists on the flimsiest of evidence, and have to walk back their words.

SPLC, for example, made a name for themselves by winning lawsuits against the KKK and Aryan Nations. Now they are losing lawsuits and having to apologize for falsely calling people "extremists": https://www.newsweek.com/splc-nawaz-million-apologizes-98187...

In the article about PewDiePie, Vox tries to call Laci Green "alt-right". I'm sorry, if Laci Green is alt-right, then the word has lost all meaning. They updated their story, but the update was pretty inadequate: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1074762800109637633

https://twitter.com/prettybadlefty/status/107234761673268428... is my favorite take on this

"It's just a heated gaming moment, over the course of several years!"

I think previously it has not been so much accidents as shock humor that is prevalent among young people (most famously often shown at 4chan) that clashed against the mainstream. Paying two poor indian guys 5 bucks to write "Death to jews" (or something like that) and dance around is probably in poor taste but my guess is that the words were chosen more because "you cannot say that" than trying to spread that message.

Considering he spends tens of hours a week producing inane, barely researched content and commentary and also handles most of his own admin I'm not surprised. People with a tenth of his audience have staff dedicated to making sure that things like that don't happen.

What's more interesting is that every single bleeding-heart journalist that seems to have an issue with him all have tweets praising Nazis, throwing racial slurs around or generally being whatever they're criticising Felix for.

An example from the Vox writer: "seeing #WhyIJoinedTwitter trending and all i can think of is, Don't be stupid, be a smartie! Come and join the Nazi party!" - with gif of people doing Nazi salutes [0]

Call that satire if you like - which is how she's trying to defend it - but that's exactly what Felix is repeatedly crucified for. Just bad luck for her too, I guess. Except she's not apologising for it, nor is she being punished by her employer nor is she having articles written about her for it.

[0] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1024721866823491584

I have not stayed extremely up-to-date on PewDiePie's various scandals. But the one I am mainly aware of was him calling someone that killed him (in-game) the n word. How is this the same as that tweet?

It's not. We're talking about a different scandal altogether here from a few days ago (the one referenced in the article) where Felix gave a "shout out" to a couple dozen different channels - one of them for some sort of anime content. That channel turned out to have antisemitic content as well. Felix promptly apologised and removed the link to their channel.

To someone not growing up in America it isn't clear that you can't say the n-word. We see people say it all the time in tv shows so we just copy that. Therefore it makes perfect sense that Europeans uses the n-word without being racist. Once they are told to stop they usually do though.

Classic cherry-picking logic.

If, on the contrary, let's cherry picking the good things said by Pewd, then anyone can come at the opposite statement.

I am really disturbed by this line of thinking, which bases conclusions on top of unfounded claims in the first place.

If someone can choose negative things one says, it means that they said negative things that outweigh the good ones. It doesn't take many negative things sometimes (often just 1) to be enough to outrage people. No one is going to ignore the negative things because he also happened to say good things (subjectively of course).

You seem to be saying that they're cherry picking the negative things which means they can't be 'unfounded claims' like you say later.

> If someone can choose negative things one says, it means that they said negative things that outweigh the good ones

No it doesn't. Why do you think it means the negatives must outweigh the positives?

Because this isn't a zero-sum game. If you say 9,999 good things on the internet and 1 offensive thing people aren't going to say 'oh... but he said 9,999 good ones so we should ignore the one that we find offensive'.

Your first comment was about a person's negative statement outweighing their positive ones, but this attempt to clarify doesn't address that at all, and instead focuses solely on others' perceptions of that person. Which are you talking about? Or if you're claiming they're linked, what is the link?

The link is a perception one. To people who view those original statements as negative ones they're not going to care about anything positive and the positive ones won't minimize the negatives ones for them usually. Therefore, if there are negative statements generally some people will find that they outweigh any positives said.

I assumed the link was pretty obvious... to paint a vivid picture if you have a person or group that says nice things most of the time about puppy dogs but just once says some hateful nazi rhetoric, someone out there will find that the negative outweighs the positive and won't care that there are positive statements.

Edit - I probably should've qualified my statement in my original post to better state that position. I can see now that it seems my statement is an absolute for all people. Not my intent.

I understand the perception thing. But your original comment said nothing about perception, and presented it as a truth about the person and their comments (one that would be true independent of anybody else's perceptions of it).

So, to clarify, you're saying these perceptions aren't necessarily true? If so, I'd suggest that your original comment comes across as saying something very different.

To state myself clearly:

I am disturbed by the line of thinking of basing conclusion on media reports.

I do not say negative outweighs positive or vise versa. That's not my point.

My ultimate point is that a person is complex. If you want to base your perception on media reports, that's clearly lazy and manipulated. To know a person, you need to see the whole picture. Then if you want to claim that a person's repetitive attacks from media is because that person is problematic, that's disturbing.

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