Approved ~ AA
Update: PewDiePie no longer plans to donate $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League, the YouTuber said Thursday in a new video. His donation to the ADL, whose stated mission is to combat anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, had been an attempt to “put an end to these alt-right claims that [have] been thrown against me,” he said. After listening to criticism that followed his announcement of the donation, PewDiePie said he has now determined that the ADL is not a good fit for his charitable giving. “I made the mistake of picking a charity that I was advised,” he said in the video, “instead of picking a charity that I’m personally passionate about.” He apologized for “messing this up.”
Longtime YouTubers are among the first to know what it means to mature in real time on the Internet. It means constantly reckoning with what you’ve done online, which is liable to resurface and make the rounds on Twitter, prompting a new cycle of self-searching apology videos that have become a predictable genre unto themselves.
No one has epitomized this cycle more than PewDiePie, a.k.a. Felix Kjellberg, a.k.a. YouTube’s biggest star, who celebrated reaching 100 million subscribers this week by donating $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that has condemned him in the past for making Nazi jokes in his videos, which they said at the time was helping to put anti-Semitic rhetoric into the “mainstream.”
David Adams