Initially, Kjellberg merely, silently, edited out the portion showing May’s video, likely thinking it would blow over. Kjellberg took things further by grabbing his dog’s paws and waving them around, seemingly in a very poor attempt to mimic sign language, and said, in an odd voice attempting to imitate May, “Sorry, are my nails distracting you?” Comments flowed in pretty quickly calling Kjellberg out for mocking a deaf creator. He then grabbed his dog and commented that May has the same “crazy nails” as Maya. He then paused it and rudely said, “I’m not listening to this.” Kjellberg watched the video for maybe 2 seconds, with his eyes widening in mock horror. The video Kjellberg reacted to was one of May telling a funny story that happened at a drive-thru. On July 26, 2022, Kjellberg uploaded a video to YouTube titled “My Dog Cringes At TikToks…” The video saw him and his dog, Maya, watching TikTok videos and poking fun at the ones they deemed “cringy.” Soon, the duo came across a video from Scarlet May who is a popular deaf TikTok creator and communicates with sign language. However, despite apologizing and claiming that he has grown and will do better, he still continues to do harm, and his latest target was the deaf community. Kjellberg has apologized after all of these instances of controversy and said he was “sickened” to learn his name had been used in the Christchurch shooting.
He was even name dropped by the Christchurch shooter in 2019. His anti-Semitic rhetoric has conjured him up quite a following of alt-right groups, Nazis, and white supremacists. These jokes trivialized sexual assault and even went as far as him posting a music video titled “It’s Raping Time.” In 2017, he uploaded a video in which he paid 2 men to hold up a sign that read “Death to All Jews.” After this incident, he uploaded a separate video in which he used a racial slur. Shortly after he debuted his channel, he became known for sick rape jokes. As his channel grew, his content became more varied and expanded to include vlogs, comedy shorts, formatted shows, and music videos.įrom the very beginning, though, Kjellberg has been a problematic creator and has often been steeped in controversy. He started his channel in 2010, and back then, it was largely a gaming channel, with his Let’s Play videos racking up huge viewership numbers. Kjellberg is the biggest individual YouTube creator of all time, with a channel boasting 111 million subscribers. YouTube creator PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, recently mocked a deaf woman on his YouTube channel, which, sadly, isn’t actually surprising considering his history.