Cancel Culture and Media Bias

Cancel culture is a a phenomenon on social media where people go out of their way to defame someone with a celebrity status. Some deserve the call-outs if they've done very unethical actions, as an example, Austin Jones. The latter was a former YouTuber that mainly had an audience of young teenage girls. He used his fame to manipulate those teenage girls to take videos of themselves twerking or dancing in front of a camera with very minimal clothing on. He would tell them that if they were really his fans, they would film themselves for him. Everyone ignored the accusations for a long time, because he seemed like an innocent, up-coming musician, until videos of him asking girls to twerk resurfaced. Austin Jones was arrested for production of child pornography in 2017, he is now serving 10 years in prison. In cases like Austin Jones, he deserved to be canceled.

Made by me using photoshop

But now Call-Out Culture is being used to get rid of those who don't deserve defamation. There's lack of evidence supporting the against the person who's being slandered. "Canceling" usually starts when a celebrity or a public figure shares an unpopular opinion or does something controversial.

Pewdiepie is a great example as he has been fighting an on-going war against the media. Wall Street Journal, Vox and The Verge are only a few examples of media publishers that slandered Pewdiepie to give him a bad reputation. It's incredibly obvious to anyone with a brain that those accusations of racism have zero supporting evidence and are merely speculations. It honestly said more about the poor journalism surrounding the situation than his behaviour. He was being accused as a Nazi, for recommending a video, failing to know that the creator used an anti-semetic joke on a different video. The media claims that it was his "secret plan" to open children's eyes to Nazi ideals–– obviously not. Seriously though? Who has the time to look through every single video to see if there was any racist jokes.

Another accusations against him was regarding his fiverr video, he was called a Nazi because he paid two boys to write "Death to All Jews" and dance around. It's very controversial, but the media misses the point of the video completely. Taken out of context, it looks really bad for Felix but he was proving a point that people would go to extreme lengths to get money–– even if it means acting immorally.

The media tends to highlight only the bad things Pewdiepie has done, of course that would paint him in a bad light. To those that don't know him he's just a racist white man, but he has raised over 1.3 million dollars for AIDS research, $200,000 for children of India struggling with poverty and $17,000 for Children Rights. The media so badly wants an enemy that they go so far to slander people who don't deserve it.

People have many opinions about James Charles, some good and some bad. Another YouTuber that goes by Tati exposed James Charles for being unloyal to her and promoting a product that wasn't hers and James using his fame to manipulate straight boys into thinking they were gay. Everyone was so quick to "cancel" James Charles without hearing his side of the story. But because everyone wanted to see James Charles fall, they took Tati's claims to be the truth and became biased against any of James' explanation. The male beauty guru lost nearly 3 million subscribers in a span of only a few days. James Charles then posted a video explaining what "actually" happened with receipts after his apology that received a lot of backlash. Now people don't know who to believe, Tati or James? After James second video many learned not to cancel someone very quickly, some even thought Tati was petty for not answering James texts or calls when they could've solve the problem long ago, instead she made a video and monetized their feud. Tati soon deleted her "Bye Sister" video when people realized she was lying.