Do we like PewDiePie?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Real stains from 2017 to 2019 sit next to real charity work, and there's no recent campaigning against anyone to tip it either way.
Felix Kjellberg, the Swede behind PewDiePie, built his name on loud, jokey gaming videos and became the face of YouTube in the early 2010s. By 2014 he had passed 25 million subscribers and was using that reach to raise money for children's charity.
The wheels came off in 2017. Fortune reported that Disney dropped him after the Wall Street Journal flagged antisemitic content on his channel, and the second season of his YouTube show was cancelled. The ADL had criticised him after he paid freelancers to hold up a sign with an antisemitic message. He apologised for the words while attacking the media coverage, saying the videos were jokes.
Later that year he used a racial slur in a live game stream and laughed it off, and a game studio cut off his access to its products in response. Fortune's report at the time carried no apology from him. The record shows a man who repeatedly pushed jokes past where most people would stop.
In March 2019 the Christchurch mosque shooter name-checked him before the attack. He tweeted that he felt sickened to have his name uttered by the attacker and sent sympathy to the victims. Later he said he regretted targeting the reporters behind the Journal article after his followers sent them death threats, and he walked away from the Subscribe to PewDiePie meme.
On the harm check, we found no campaigning against trans people, women or migrants, and no vaccine or climate claims from him. Our search came up empty on those topics and on any work with people pushing harm. In a 2019 New York Times interview, as reported by ComicBook.com, he said politics doesn't interest him and Trump was a meme that stopped being funny. The record is thin on his views, not clean.
Lately he's mostly gone quiet, and in May 2026 he said he's winding up his vlog series. Nothing new and nasty has turned up. The question is whether you can forgive a young man's worst jokes because the older man has gone quiet.