Quite a few ofYouTube’s earliest influencers and entertainers have seen their popularity wane as trends change and new faces join the platform. PewDiePie, however, hasn’t gone anywhere. Felix Kjellberg started hisYouTubecareer in 2010 and hasn’t fallen off the radar since. He remains a tour de force on the platform, making a broad variety of content, collaborating with tons of other famous influencers, and entertaining millions of loyal fans. Recently, however, PewDiePie made headlines when famedMinecraftstreamer Dream spoke up against a recent PewDiePie video that had Dream in the thumbnail.
PewDiePie’s video was about streamers caught cheating in video games, and the thumbnail referenced the recent controversy aroundDream cheating in aMinecraftspeedrun. Dream was a pretty small part of the video, despite being the core of the thumbnail. Dream later tweeted about it, and good-naturedly made fun of PewDiePie for using him as clickbait, but Dream’s fans took the tweet differently and started criticizing PewDiePie. While this controversy is sure to be an inconvenience for PewDiePie, it’s not the biggest social dispute that he’s landed in.
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PewDiePie’s Relationship with Controversy
Whether it’s through his YouTube videos or his livestreams,PewDiePie tends to get on the wrong sideof public opinion. Just last year, PewDiePie met criticism for joking about the COVID-19 pandemic in its early months, for instance. PewDiePie also has an unfortunate history of using racial slurs and condoning anti-Semitic gestures. In fact, many YouTube users have started petitions to get him removed from the platform due to these controversies. There’s plenty of other instances besides these where he’s rubbed people the wrong way, and PewDiePie’s brand is a little hard to separate from his habit for stirring up trouble.
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YouTube’s Biggest Figures Persist
Something ironic and amusing about the PewDiePie-Dream controversy is that Dream is hardly free from controversy himself. Aside from lingering fan ire about hisMinecraftspeedrun, Dream was recently criticized for failing to commit to a humanitarian initiative he planned. Dream told fans that he’d celebrate Pride Month in June by donating all the revenue from his streams to LGBTQ organizations. Fans got excited for the plan, but thenDream hardly streamed during June, resulting in backlash from fans. Similarly to PewDiePie, Dream remains influential despite this controversy and others.
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