One of YouTube’s biggest stars has been dumped by Disney-owned Maker Studios due to jokes and social commentary involving the Holocaust.
Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, has tens of millions of followers of his YouTube channel and nearly 15 billion views. Regardless, a crowd-sourcing joke last month involving “death to all Jews” signs, among other comments, were too much for Maker Studios.
“Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case and the resulting videos are inappropriate. Maker Studios has made the decision to end our affiliation with him going forward,” a spokesman told Variety in a statement on Monday.
The Swedish creator insists that his content was meant to highlight a kind of materialism that prompts individuals to do anything for a quick buck. He paid two individuals in India to hold up a sign that read “death to all Jews.”
“I was trying to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online. I picked something that seemed absurd to me — that people on (crowd-sourcing platform) Fiverr would say anything for 5 dollars,” he wrote Sunday on the social-media platform Tumblr.
A YouTube spokesperson emailed Adweek on Tuesday to highlight further professional fallout for the star, saying the company would be “removing the PewDiePie channel from Google Preferred.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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