Details emerge about teacher who criticized PewDiePie, school to have extra security amid threat reports

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Update (December 31):

The Seattle Times reporter who covered this story has revealed their newsroom received threat messages from PewDiePie fans after the story was published. Details here.

Original story follows:

Earlier this week, we reported about a video that received quite a lot of attention on Twitter. Shared by a school kid, the video – as per what the kid claimed – showed a History teacher saying distasteful stuff about PewDiePie, YouTube’s most subscribed channel. Specifically, the teacher is heard telling students that promoting PewDiePie is like promoting antisemitism and genocide, and retweeting their tweets can potentially land people in legal trouble.

Here’s the video (in case you haven’t taken a look yet):
https://streamable.com/fcyvx

And here’s the tweet from the student in question:
https://twitter.com/Rissian9/status/1073844634420277248

Up until now, not much was known about the teacher, except that they teach somewhere in the United States (this information was revealed by the student himself in the discussion on their tweet). However now, more information about the teacher has surfaced.

According to a new report from The Seattle Times, the teacher is from Hamilton International Middle School in Seattle, and he teaches social-studies there. The report further reveals that after some students put up pro-PewDiePie posters around the school (as part of the ongoing #subscribetopewdiepie campaign), the teacher tried to throw some light on PewDiePie (real name Felix Kjellberg) during a lesson on real and fake news.

Here’s is the transcript of what the teacher had said:

And by every time you retweet one of these things, or every time you promote this idea, you are promoting ignorance, racism, genocide, antisemitism…..these are all things that you are putting forward when you are doing anything that promotes PewDiePie. So be careful about this. If someone decided to, if something would happen and PewDiePie were to be sued for this, you could be complicit if you retweet it, they can make you pay a fine as well, because you have officially published anti-Semitic things, so if you are republishing this stuff, you could get in trouble for it, be very aware that that is a real thing

While the teacher declined to talk to press as well as asked not to be identified, the Hamilton school authorities reached out to the Seattle Police Department over persistent reports of threats. The police, however, did not find any “substantive” threats, but the school will still extra security.

PewDiePie had reacted to the video as soon as it came into his notice.

https://twitter.com/pewdiepie/status/1074939242923614208

And yesterday, he came up with a regular ‘Pew News’ video where he used the term ‘dog shit’ for this whole episode, while saying a person with such an authority over kids should not be saying things which are not correct. He also talked about a lot of other stuff, which we have summarized here.

https://youtu.be/Q9pfRe7Jd0M

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