It seems like a new form of witch hunting?
It’s the degradation of all media rather than just a large portion of it, which is new and worrying.
You're absolutely right about it being a constant in the history of journalism though. Recently I've heard a lot of talk about how the situation in this respect is getting worse, but I think it's important to remember that yellow journalism is nothing new, nor is the influence it wields. The Spanish American War was essentially started by yellow journalist media barons fabricating public consensus, and the ramifications of that war were fairly severe in both hemispheres. Maybe Vox picking on pewdiepie is unfair, or maybe they're justified. But viewed in the proper context it's inconsequential either way; neither Vox nor pewdiepie are provoking bullshit wars. Thank the gods for that.
But they are provoking bullshit wars.
Being an unreasonable extremist and drowning out the reasonable voices on your team gives the unreasonable extremists on the other team license to do the same.
People being able to express contrary opinions in public is a release valve that allows a moderate consensus to form.
Polarizing everything and then shutting down public debate is how you get into a war. Just because nobody is actively building munitions factories doesn't make this a benign development that it's reasonable to ignore just because the country is not yet literally on fire.
No not actually. Hyperbole is fine but don't confuse it for the real thing.
To reiterate my point: Yellow journalism that successfully warmongers is a far cry from yellow journalism that gets into a heated argument with a youtube celebrity. The methods employed by yellow journalists may be identical (in fact I'd argue they probably are), but there is a serious disparity in the severity of the outcome. And considering that in one case we're talking about significant loss of human life, I don't think you should be abstracting that away so coldly.
You should be thankful that the Vox/pewdiepie spat is not getting thousands of people killed and territory annexed. Is that not clear?
When you find a tiger loose in a city, the response should be to do what it takes to get it off the streets, not that we should be thankful that everything is fine because so far it has only been hunting puppies.
Only if you're abstracting away the value of real human lives. If a tiger breaks loose you should be concerned by that tiger but ALSO be thankful that nobody has been eaten by it. If you forget the later, you forget your humanity.
Who the fuck cares about what pewdiepie does with his platform for his speech?
Trump, on the other hand, has far more power, but hasn't figured out how to anything other than being the center of everyone's attention.
And while Fox News is ginning up fervor against immigration in the US, it's not like we're going to go into a serious war with Mexico over it. Thank God.
It's the "humourless, ironclad dogma" aspect that provokes the response of people like Pewdiepie, and it's that aspect of the reaction to Pewdiepie's satire that makes it a self-completing feedback loop wherever it's discussed.
A generation ago, this description belonged to right-wing moralists like Focus on the Family and Tipper Gore. Now it belongs to the left-wing moralists who have largely taken over corporate messaging and university curricula.
To me, the political aspect is less interesting than the underlying desire to control thoughts and behavior. The most alarming aspect is that it has gone beyond redefining what constitutes crime to using social media to attempt to destroy the lives of those who run afoul of the agenda. And it only takes a handful of people to start up the outrage machine and direct all of its fury at a particular person. It's the source of the sense of dystopia that I feel many days.
It will be interesting to see what the generation coming up now ("Zoomers" I guess they're called) does in reaction to the full-throated adoption of the humourless, ironclad dogma of the Millennials. I see it played out almost daily between my millennial daughter and her Zoomer son. I think it's going to be uglier than the Boomers fighting with the Silent Generation in the 60s.
a) A person with an incredibly impressionable, young, and naive viewerbase would shout out an obvious, virulent bigot because he shares their views or
b) A person with an incredible impressionable, young, and naive viewerbase would shout out someone that is an obvious, virulent bigot because he's so divorced from reality outside of video games that he didn't understand that they would be offensive.
his followers arent dumb and youre underestimating what young viewers are able to figure out. if they can see that its not a big deal then why are you so outraged for?
The video INCLUDED neo-nazi rhetoric. Literally click on any others and they include n-slurs in the title. Again, either he's a moron or he's a racist. I'm not sure if the former is that much better a look for him.
Also, young kids can figure things out, yes, but the biggest YouTube star on the planet shouldn't be normalizing neo-nazi terrorism.
none of the videos have n-word in the title, are you making that up? did you read about how that channel is verified by youtube itself?
now youre calling it terrorism? slow down there. i think you should learn to take a joke like the rest of the world. if everyone else can figure it out then maybe its you that has an extreme problem with it?
One of them did, it has since been deleted by youtube. It probably slipped by people, including youtube moderation for years, because it was a deliberate misspelling of the word "reneging".
I'm not going to link it for obvious reasons, but if you're skeptical you can find it by searching for the guy's mirror channel on one of the more infamous "free speech youtube alternatives" where he's uploaded it again with a note about youtube deleting it. In all honesty, I think it's likely this anime review guy is masking genuine nazi propaganda behind an edgy humor. I think he's doing it in a way that in each instance he usually has plausible deniability, but when viewed as a whole a clear picture emerges. I think this is why many people including yourself, youtube moderation, and supposedly pewdiepie did not notice it on first viewing. Furthermore I think that it's uncharitable and morally wrong to accuse people who missed it of having character defects, so please don't think that I'm impugning your character by disagreeing with you.
I can still see it. 2 of them posted 2 years ago with 400k views each. If he had more I wouldn't know, which is even more concerning.
I'm not going to see it as a character defect, but I will see it as incredibly irresponsible. It would be irresponsible even without Quilette editors tut-tutting about the people who are disturbed by it. The fact that people defend it even with the full scope of the evidence available is not acceptable however.
I'm pretty sure most people, including the FBI Director and Jeff Sessions, believe the Charlottesville attack was terrorism.
>In one example — a video Kjellberg publicly liked, leaving a comment underneath — E;R uses aerial footage of the moment when a car drove through a crowd of people during the white supremacist-led “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The incident left multiple people injured and one protester, Heather Heyer, dead. E;R turns a scene from Netflix’s live-action Death Note movie, describing how a death is carried out when a name is written inside the titular notebook, into a joke about Heyer’s death using actual footage from Charlottesville. [0]
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134748/pewdiepie-er-pe...
Therefore, paywalls and online subscription is actually the best thing that could happen to online journalism.