Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg is the world's most popular streamer, a goofy gamer whose reactionary tendencies were relentlessly encouraged by YouTube and its engagement machinery. Now he faces the consequences, rich but frozen out of mainstream media and invoked half-ironically by alt-right spree killers. — Read the rest
The Verge reports that top YouTuber Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg is rescinding a $50,000 pledge to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group that opposes antisemitism and supports Israel. The donation, made in the wake of Kjellberg's giggling use of antisemitic imagery and racial slurs on his game streams, did not go down well with his followers. — Read the rest
YouTuber PewDiePie has more subscribers than anyone else on the network, and some of his rabid fans have released at least two ransomware strains that encrypt hard drives and display a notice that informs victims that a decryption key will be made available only when PewDiePie's account gets 100 million subscribers. — Read the rest
Gamer star PewDiePie was set for the big-time: 53m subscribers to his YouTube gamering channel and a hot deal with Disney to take his clean-cut mug to mass culture stardom. But then he started posting about the Jews.
— Read the rest[Felix] Kjellberg, a 27-year-old Swede whose YouTube antics secured him multimillion-dollar deals with YouTube and Disney, posted a Jan.
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Your gaming setup might give Pewdiepie a run for his money, but is your gaming audio gear up to par? If you're still rocking a pair of earbuds from five years ago, you're likely dampening your gaming experience. — Read the rest
You can buy MrBeast-branded burgers, but heaven knows you don't want to eat them. The YouTube star, real name James Donaldson, is suing the company that licensed his brand for fast food products, because they're, quote, 'inedible' and are harming his reputation. — Read the rest
Right now, almost half of all the websites that exist use a .com domain name. This makes it incredibly hard to find a domain name that hasn't already been taken, and if you already named and registered your company then you may be in for a really tough road ahead. — Read the rest
A white man in his 20s was taken into custody after killing 49 and wounding dozens more at two Christchurch mosques, reports the BBC. Authorities described him as an "extremist right-wing terrorist"; he live-streamed one of the attacks on the internet. — Read the rest
When bots finally accounted for half the traffic on the internet, Media Experts speculated that algorithms would start identifying bots as a better advertising target than humans. Max Read points out that fear of "Inversion" is now quaint. Now everything is so fake online that no-one trusts numbers at all. — Read the rest
Youtube allows people — some of them not very nice — to earn incredible livings by performing stunts, playing videogames, creating sketches, anything that attracts an audience.
More than a week after Logan Paul made an obnoxious, racist video in Tokyo and another video showing the body of a man who commited suicide in a forest in Japan, YouTube has kicked the 22-year-old millionaire out of its prefered ad network and canceled plans to make movies and shows with him. — Read the rest
The Offworld staff had a lot to say about nostalgia last week, particularly around the announcement that a remake of the fan-favorite 1997 game Final Fantasy VII is on the way.
