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YouTube Personality PewDiePie Drops Racial Slur While Live Streaming, Issues Apology

Popular YouTube star and one of the platform's biggest and most successful creators, PewDiePie has once again found himself in hot water over racial insensitivity and controversial action.

The Let's Play YouTuber, real name Felix Kjellberg, casually dropped the N-bomb in a stream of game Battlegrounds.

PewDiePie

This led to a huge public outcry, as the YouTuber is still given a platform as a content creator on YouTube and has millions of fans, a lot of whom even came to PewDiePie's defence over his use of the word.

The controversy even seemingly caused Campo Santo, developers of game Firewatch which PewDiePie had videos of on his channel, to look at issuing DMCA takedown requests on his videos of their products and cutting all future ties with the content creator.

However, PewDiePie has now made an official apology video in response to the whole thing, where he calls himself an 'idiot', how he hears this kind of language used by other players 'whenever I go online' and how he thinks it is 'immature and stupid', and he goes on to apologise if he caused any hurt or disappointment.

You can watch the apology video below:

It's a short video, where PewDiePie certainly makes a lot of apologetic sounds. However, it is not overly long ago that he was embroiled in another racially insensitive controversy, so the test will be to see if this one sticks.

The greater discussion may be why such language is so rife in online playing environments, why YouTube does not have a zero tolerance to this kind of language, and why so many were so ready to come to PewDiePie's defence over the use of a horrific racial slur.


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Joe GlassAbout Joe Glass

Joe Glass has been contributing to Bleeding Cool for about four years. He's been a roaming reporter at shows like SDCC and NYCC, and also has a keen LGBTQ focus, with his occasional LGBTQ focus articles, Tales from the Four Color Closet. He is also now Bleeding Cool's Senior Mutant Correspondent thanks to his obsession with Marvel's merry mutants. Joe is also a comics creator, writer of LGBTQ superhero team series, The Pride, the first issue of which was one of the Top 25 ComiXology Submit Titles of 2014. He is also a co-writer on Stiffs, a horror comedy series set in South Wales about call centre workers who hunt the undead by night. One happens to be a monkey. Just because.
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