“It was just a joke!” How many times have you heard that before? A racist comment wasn’t actually racist – it was just a joke, duh. The just-a-joke justification is a favourite fallback for those looking to dodge responsibility for actions with unforeseen fallouts. The most recent example of “I’m just joking, guys” is brought to you by PewDiePie, the world’s biggest YouTube superstar.

On Tuesday, YouTube and Maker Studios, Disney’s digital entertainment company, confirmed that that they have ended their relationship with 27-year-old Swede Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg over antisemitism in his videos. To be clear: that doesn’t mean that PewDiePie is being taken off YouTube or losing any of his 53 million followers. It means that he will no longer have such easy access to the sort of advertising opportunities that netted him $15m in 2016 alone.

PewDiePie has always courted controversy – his unfiltered nature is what has helped gather such a large “bro army”, as he calls his fans. But now he has gone too far. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal found antisemitism and Nazi imagery in nine of his videos. A video from 11 January, for example, featured two semi-naked Indian men dancing while holding a banner reading “Death to all Jews”.

In a 12 February Tumblr post, PewDiePie explained that the video wasn’t actually inciting people to kill Jews. It was a joke! He was “trying to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online”. The video was supposed to highlight the absurdity that “people on Fiverr [a website where freelancers offer their services for $5] would say anything for 5 dollars”. Including “Death to all Jews”.

PewDiePie actually did succeed in demonstrating how crazy the modern world is – just not in the way he quite set out to. The PewDiePie furore is an important lesson in the way in which antisemitism can creep into society and slowly become normalized. More specifically, it shines a light on the way in which prejudice is packaged up and spread online. The way in which racism and hatred are incubated in online communities and spill over into the offline world.

Oh come on! Surely that’s going too far? PewDiePie may be a moron, but surely he didn’t mean his jokes to actually stoke antisemitism, right?

The thing is, whatever PewDiePie meant doesn’t really matter. A joke is never just a joke, you see: it always has consequences. Jokes help identify and solidify social divisions. You either get the joke and you’re one of us, or you don’t get it and you’re one of them.

Jokes also help normalize unpalatable ideas. And, unconscious though it may have been, PewDiePie has already helped do just that: helped antisemitism become just a little bit more mainstream. After all, if a hugely popular YouTube star is saying that sort of thing then it must be OK, right?

Indeed, PewDiePie’s work has been gleefully praised by prominent white supremacists such as Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi news blog. On 22 January, the Daily Stormer changed its motto to “The world’s #1 PewDiePie fansite”, and Anglin wrote a blogpost congratulating Kjellberg for “making the masses comfortable with our ideas”.

As Anglin pointed out, PewDiePie is “arguably the most watched person on the planet” and is “also the kind of guy that hundreds of millions of people could easily swear eternal allegiance to”. PewDiePie doesn’t look like a monster, you see. He is boyish and cute; he’s a joker, not a polemicist. You don’t think you’re being influenced, you think you’re being entertained.

Disney severs ties with YouTube star PewDiePie over antisemitic videos Read more

Propaganda and prejudice are as old as time, and jokes have always been one way in which they inveigle themselves out of niche groups and into mainstream society. However, as times change, these jokes develop new forms of packaging. The Nazis had cartoons, for example.

The Daily Stormer is named for Der Stürmer, a Nazi tabloid newspaper that played an important role in spreading antisemitism among the German population. It used antisemitic caricatures and racist cartoons to dehumanize Jews and slowly spread antisemitism among its core readership of the young, poor and poorly educated. And it worked. In 1942, Hitler said: “One must never forget the services rendered by the Stürmer ... Now that Jews are known for what they are, nobody any longer thinks that Streicher [the editor of the paper] libelled them.”

Today, tabloids are dying out but we have memes and internet communities. And these have created their own digitally native ways to spread hate. Much of this started with 4Chan, a notorious internet message board, which spawned a racist trolling culture and basically wrote the rulebook for the way in which white supremacy is coded and spread online.

Hatred is camouflaged in absurd memes and an overblown rhetorical style, hidden in cartoon figures like the “alt-right” mascot Pepe the Frog. Nothing is serious; everything is a joke.

Hannah Arendt famously talked about the “banality of evil”. The idea that the cogs of capitalism help tyrants take control of people and turn evil into unthinking acts of bureaucracy: people aren’t murderers, they’re “just doing their job”.

You could say that today’s digital economy has spawned a new “bro-nality of evil”. Racist memes serve as in-jokes that help solidify bonds between alienated white men online. The style of these memes, their overblown exaggerated nature, means we often don’t take them seriously. Dismiss them as jokes. But this is how antisemitism creeps into our lives. Not with a bang but with a punchline.