Clickbait media’s obsession with Pewdiepie needs to stop J.M Follow Feb 3 · 5 min read

Felix in Japan, picture: instagram/pewdiepie

You’d be hard pressed to find a news article about popular youtuber PewDiePie that is not clickbait or altered news, a slew of articles come out about Felix Kjellberg every so often, less so now that he has taken a break from the platform.

Kjellberg, a 30 year old resident of Brighton, UK has amassed 103 million subscribers on his YouTube channel since he started posting in 2010, making him the most subscribed single person content creator on the website, but being the most well known also means you’re the easiest to notice, and using your name will get people’s attention.

This is abused by news websites who use every excuse to write an article about him, even going so far as to write articles based around instagram photos his wife, Marzia Kjellberg puts up or shares in her stories, oftentimes these articles will make events sound worse than they are, or make up things on the spot because the article isn’t quite long enough.

And it begs the question, when it is enough? When does clickbait finally cross the line into something darker?‌

Felix and Marzia in Japan, photo: itsmarziapie instagram

Felix and Marzia have been visiting Japan where they own a second home and a total of eight articles were posted around that visit, all of the based on instagram stories or photos Marzia shared over the course of a week.

YouTube personalities are celebrities in their own right, or however you want to classify it, but it’s hard to not see a pattern with Felix being one of the most media-covered youtubers on the platform, you won’t see Markiplier or Jacksepticeye getting a new article daily based on their social media posts.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging the journalists who write these columns, I just think it’s a symptom of a larger problem that nobody really wants to talk about, and that is prevalent among all social media — the urge to gain clout and attention, many people fall into the trap of wanting more social media clout, which is one of the reasons Felix had quit twitter in December, citing the toxic behavior of users and false posturing on the site had become too much for him.

If you head on over to the news tab on Google’s search for “PewDiePie” you’re bound to see some actually useful articles that impart information in a non-biased manner, but mostly you’re just going to see clickbait articles written by people who either don’t like the YouTuber, or who want to throw a story together for the sake of having one, even if it’s based off one instagram photo.

Metro UK‌ is one of the most guilty when it comes to click-baiting Pewds in their titles, often making the content sound more serious or dramatic than it is