YouTube star PewDiePie has come to the defense of his social media-famous colleague Jenna Marbles.
Marbles, 33, announced Thursday that she was quitting the platform, where she boasts over 20.2 million followers, after facing backlash for past videos where she dons blackface.
The backlash was more akin to bullying, though, PewDiePie said in a post Friday.
“Jenna Marbles was one of the most genuinely good people on this platform and now she gets bullied off the site by mistakes that happened 8-10 years ago…Who cares?” writes the 30-year-old, who has over 105 million YouTube subscribers. “These actions reflect in no way who she is and the content she makes today, anyone who watches her can see that. Some things were more leviant [sic] a few years ago — that’s not to say it was right, but where the line is drawn from the past and today seems non existent. I thought the point was to learn from your mistakes and do better? We all have problems in our past, no one in the world is perfect,” he goes on, concluding that, without Marbles and her ilk, the site “will be filled with nothing but douchetubers who don’t care, while the people who do, gets pushed out. So disappointed with the internet and how far things have gotten.”
The post, which has racked up over 322,00 upvotes and 15,000 comments as of this writing, features a range of responses, with many people calling cancel culture toxic and agreeing Marbles was unfairly made to quit YouTube for a “spray tan to the face.”
Marbles, whose real name is Jenna Mourey, made the videos in question between 2011-2012. In one, she wears blackface to impersonate rapper Nikki Minaj; in another, she raps about Asian people using lyrics including “Hey Ching Chong Wing Wong, shake your King Kong ding dong.” She has since made the clips private, and posted an apology video called “A Message,” which was met with mixed reactions on social media.
PewDiePie himself is no stranger to backlash, either. In 2017, Disney dropped a multimillion-dollar deal with the Swede after he posted a series of anti-Semitic videos.
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