Whether you’re a hardcore gamer, a casual intermittent Candy Crush player, or you must know already that the entertainment industry - as vaguely as it is described - is enormously interconnected around the world. What you may not know, however, is that from companies that develop the games to world renowned YouTubers, anyone can occasionally express their opinions in matters that expand outside the realm of having fun in a virtual world and go as far as, let’s say politics.
Blizzard is an example of the above description. The American video game developer and publisher recently banned four Hearthstone players in total for supporting Hong Kong protesters in a political protest.
The last addition, however, is PewDiePie who also got banned from entire China. Specifically, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg does not exist anymore according to the country with the biggest population on earth, due to a video that the most famous YouTuber in the world uploaded on October 16th, where he criticized the situation between China and Hong Kong and the recent incident with Blizzard. He then went on to compare China’s president with Winnie the Pooh. The latter character has already been banned in the Asian country due to previous similar comparisons.
Apparently somewhat shocked to find out, he posted on twitter “just found out im banned in china. shit fu... sucks so hard dude. China took copyright of Pewdiepie in 2017 without me being able to stop them anyway, guess they can't sell any more pewdiepie wedding dresses now lol”.
The said video led to Felix’s existence being wiped from the entire Chinese version of the world wide web. He even uploaded a video a few hours ago showing that searching his name over there returns now results now.
As weird and unnecessarily funny this may seem, a real issue might be about to arise which could potentially concern gamers and YouTube enthusiasts around the globe. Although similar incidents, bans and virtual punishments on players’ accounts have taken place in the past, scrapping a person out of existence on the internet is not as common and should definitely raise at least a few flags.
Think about it long enough and you’ll come to realize that this is not just another one of those times that China is proving it is a strong advocate of the absence of the people’s freedom on the internet and the prevalence of propaganda. More than that, it is the clearest series of actions we’ve had so far between eastern and western ‘freedom-of-speech’ comparisons.
Thankfully for PewDiePie and all of his fans, of course, the independent YouTuber is a hailed celebrity in the western world already, hence we can keep enjoying his work intact. What are your thoughts on the matter? Share them with a comment below!
