Another controversy as PewDiePie overtakes YouTube Sports in subscribers

NOTE: For all latest, breaking news related to PewDiePie, other YouTubers, and Youtube in general, head here.

Update (December 12):

While the anti-Semitic shout out controversy fire isn’t doused yet, something else from PewDiePie’s video is now making headlines: the comment Felix made on SonicFox’s acceptance speech at the 2018 Game Awards for winning the Best Esports Player. Details here.

Update (December 12):

PewDiePie landed in hot water after he endorsed a YouTube channel that contains videos featuring anti-Semitic content. The Verge was the first publication to highlight this news. Now PewDiePie has responded to the controversy by attacking The Verge. Details here.

Update (December 11):

How Pornhub gained from Tumblr crisis and PewDiePie vs T-Series war – read our latest coverage by heading here.

Update (December 11):

Marques Brownlee – tech video producer, popularly known as MKBHD – has jumped into the T-Series vs PewDiePie YouTube subscriber battle, supporting the Swedish YouTuber. He has also talked in detail about what’s wrong with YouTube Rewind videos. It’s a must read – head here.

Original story follows:

If you are a fan of the over 75 million subscribers strong PewDiePie YouTube channel, we have both good as well as bad news today. The good news is PewDiePie has left behind the YouTube Sports channel in terms of subscribers.

Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg himself announced the news in a tweet, and his choice of words give a clear indication of how elated he his. Take a look:

https://twitter.com/pewdiepie/status/1072192564369985537

Needless to say, the excitement among the channel’s fans/followers is knowing no bounds:

https://twitter.com/nopeifyaltalt/status/1072193289196052480
https://twitter.com/Cosmic__Craft/status/1072193010027425792

And some of them are now even urging the YouTube superstar to come up with their own Rewind video:

https://twitter.com/elis5e/status/1072193174402228224

For the uninitiated, this year’s YouTube Rewind has received so much hate from viewers that it’s on way to become the most disliked YouTube video ever. One Major reason behind so much dislike is the absence of YouTubers like PewDiePie (whose chair at least got featured in Rewind 2018).

Anyway, now coming to the bad news. Remember we brought you our coverage of the latest edition of the Pew News video, towards the end of which Felix gave shout out to some of its favorite YouTube channels? Well, he endorsed a channel named E;R which turns out has been sharing anti-Semitic stuff.

This was first spotted by Hasan Piker, who hosts Breakdown on TYT. He says the first channel PewDiePie gave a shout to is related to holocaust denial, and post the shout out, the channel’s subscriber number increased from 14k to 61k.

Then coming to E;R (which mainly posts cartoon and animated videos), he says aside from the hateful, anti-Semitic stuff, the channel contains a video featuring uninterrupted speech of 4 minutes that Adolf Hitler gave. Piker says this is a big problem given that majority of PewDiePie fans are in teens.

According to The Verge, the E;R channel has gained 15,000 subscribers since PewDiePie’s shout out. Given the kind of content E;R shares, the publication has also reached out to YouTube to know why action hasn’t been taken against the channel given the platform’s clear stance against hateful content and harassment.

PewDiePie has also been in news a lot lately due to its subscriber war with Indian music label T-Series. The fight took an ugly turn when the T-Series official website was taken down.

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