Do we like PewDiePie?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A run of offensive stunts and accusations around 2017 to 2018, set against real charity and years without any harmful campaigning that I could find.
Felix Kjellberg is the Swedish YouTuber who turned screaming at horror games into the biggest channel on the platform, and he marked 100 million subscribers in 2019. That fame came with a long list of fights, including a 2019 stoush with Indian label T-Series in which the Delhi High Court directed YouTube to remove two songs he had published.
The big one was February 2017. The Wall Street Journal reported allegations that his videos carried antisemitic jokes and Nazi imagery, and Disney's Maker Studios dropped him while YouTube cancelled his show. He apologised to anyone offended, called himself a “rookie comedian” and argued the media was twisting his words to paint him as a Nazi.
The pattern since looks more like carelessness than malice. In 2022 he was accused of mocking a deaf TikTok creator in a video, then removed the clip and wrote “Had no clue she was deaf, but kinda dumb of me to not realise”. In 2026 the news is about privacy and stepping back, not outrage.
The good stuff is real. In 2014 his fans raised $342,828 for Save the Children through an Indiegogo campaign he ran. In 2020 and 2021 he reported giving $1,520,003 in channel membership revenue to 11 charities, including Movember, Make-A-Wish and the World Food Programme.
So where do we land? He's not someone who builds a career on harm, and the charity is the sort of thing you'd want from a person with that reach. But the 2017 and 2018 episodes are why this is mixed on harm rather than a pass, and the donation U-turn doesn't help. Decent on nice, with some baggage you can't ignore.