YouTube’s most popular vlogger is currently at the center of two massive and memeified wars being waged in his name — and they represent a battle for the soul of the platform itself.

Felix Kjellberg, a.k.a. PewDiePie, has lately made the news for recommending an anti-Semitic YouTube channel in one of his videos. But his followers seem unphased by the controversy, and have devoted themselves to defending his honor from perceived slights and threats to his YouTube sovereignty. (PewDiePie has not responded to a request from Vox for comment.)

One of their two battles involves an attempt to punish YouTube for omitting PewDiePie from its 2018 “Rewind” video, which aims to commemorate the most celebrated and meaningful aspects of YouTube’s community throughout the year. The other involves an attempt to prevent his channel from being deposed as the most-subscribed channel on the site.

In a narrower sense, both fights are examples of the considerable level of influence that PewDiePie holds over his 76 million followers (and counting). But in a broader sense, both fights are rooted in the idea of what constitutes YouTube culture itself — and they represent the many complicated layers of community on YouTube in 2018.

PewDiePie resides at the center of what seems to be a growing divide between YouTube subcultures

On one side of the fight to defend PewDiePie lie many overlapping subcultures which make up huge swaths of YouTube’s general populations: its tremendous gaming communities, including Let’s Play-ers, livestreamers, machinima-style editors, and vloggers; its prank cultures and their overlap with stunt personalities like Jake and Logan Paul; and its increasingly insidious alt-right presence.

Though he’s known primarily within the gaming community, PewDiePie has fingers in all of these pies, and thus frequently unites them into a loosely affiliated group of YouTubers known for their irreverence, love of trolling and irony, and commitment to doubling down hard on jokes and memes. Though belonging to any one of these groups doesn’t make somebody alt-right, it does create a scenario where they’re more frequently exposed to alt-right rhetoric. And with so much in common, members of the more innocent subcultures within the larger group are primed for gradual induction into the alt-right’s world of online extremism.

On the other side of the fight lie many, many YouTube users who come to the site for other reasons and other forms of entertainment, and who arguably aren’t interested in supporting the cult of personalities that might be said to represent “old-school” YouTube. Instead, they come to the site for music, memes, narrative media, instructional videos, and more general forms of content consumption and entertainment.

This second group of YouTube consumers is represented nowhere more clearly than in the slowly developing year-long race for the distinction of YouTube’s most-subscribed channel. This is a title that PewDiePie has held since 2013, but over the course of 2018, his status has been increasingly threatened by another longtime channel, T-Series.

“PewDiePie versus T-Series” has become YouTube’s biggest ongoing competition

T-Series represents an increasingly dominant type of YouTube channel that has gained prominence since its creation in 2006, as YouTube has become an ever more globalized platform. Like other channels that have recently made headlines for their massively viral hit videos, T-Series is run by an Asian corporation churning out videos on a large multi-channel network that is designed to drive clicks. In the case of T-Series specifically, those videos are an endless series of fun Bollywood songs: peppy, entertaining, and posted daily by the dozens.

It’s the kind of mass-produced content that is admittedly hard for anyone to compete with, and it’s already gained T-Series the distinction of having the most views of any channel on YouTube, if not the most subscribers. But throughout 2018, T-Series has been poised to usurp PewDiePie’s status as the platform’s most-subscribed channel — and PewDiePie’s followers have vowed not to let that happen.

In their zeal to keep PewDiePie on top, they’ve turned “subscribe to PewDiePie” into a massive internet meme, stretching across multiple social media platforms and even into the real world. Supporters have pulled off some seriously major stunts, including taking out a Times Square billboard and reportedly hacking into 50,000 printers around the world in the name of promoting the meme.

It makes sense that a community full of gamers would essentially gamify YouTube subscriptions by turning them into a competition and building a “cause” around their favored contestant. But in this case, they didn’t have to work very hard to do so. That’s because a major component of this conflict, as many YouTube creators have noted, is about individual content creators — whose successes are embodied by PewDiePie’s completely organic rise to fame — feeling hemmed in by the success of automated, fully monetized corporate channels.

You may wonder why T-Series vs PewDiePie is such a big fuss, but it's because the last bit of originality is almost gone. Large corporations are taking over the platform, and the smaller creators that made YouTube what it is today are fading.



Subscribe to PewDiePie. — The BigWhiteChristmas (@RealBWC) October 30, 2018

The inherent tension between individual YouTube creators and the corporations that maintain channels on the platform has earned a serious degree of support for the “subscribe to PewDiePie” meme from other hugely popular individual creators.

The most notable of these creators is Mark Fischbach, a.k.a. Markiplier, a gaming vlogger who rose to fame in 2014 through a series of viral reaction videos. Though Fischbach’s channel and content have always been relatively apolitical, he seems at least nominally unfazed by controversy surrounding PewDiePie. In a recent video urging his 23 million followers to subscribe to PewDiePie, he mockingly, but perhaps not entirely insincerely, claimed that PewDiePie was “the heart and soul of YouTube,” and that “T-series will lead us down into a path of darkness and ignorance.” (Fischbach has not responded to a request for comment.)

Yet despite the many cogent arguments to be made about why YouTube users should be wary of the platform’s corporatization, the response from PewDiePie’s supporters faced with the challenge of slowing T-Series’ rise has also been characteristically alienating. Their efforts to increase PewDiePie’s subscriber count have included trolling, harassing T-Series fans, and lots of overt and implied racism, including some directly from PewDiePie himself: In his tongue-in-cheek T-Series diss track, he includes the line, addressed to Indian people in general, “Your language sounds like it come [sic] from a mumblerap community.” (PewDiePie also raised money for the Indian children’s charity Child Rights and You, two days before the diss video was released.)

Additionally, an inexplicably recurring element of the meme involves referring to T-Series as “T-gay.”

All of these factors have combined to make “PewDiePie versus T-Series” much more than just a meme to a whole lot of people.

The gap is now just 23.6K. Go hit that subscribe button on the T-Series page. It was fine till the time he was trolling T-Series. But now he and his followers are trolling India and Indians, which is totally unacceptable. Don't abuse back, just show our power by overtaking him. pic.twitter.com/HDkVItPxtq — Vishesh Arora (@vishesharora19) December 2, 2018

But if the meme has made “PewDiePie versus T-Series” the biggest online battleground since the launch of Fortnite, it’s also made the core conflict quite obnoxious to many onlookers.

I'm running through the forest with footfalls close behind. I stink of fear.



"Subscribe to Pewdiepie," howl the porcine monstrosities. Flecks of spittle spray as they chase ever closer.



My gun only has a single bullet left. I will never subscribe. — Reese⁉️ (@yourverygoodbud) December 4, 2018

Regardless of who cares about it, however, “PewDiePie versus T-Series” isn’t the biggest war that PewDiePie supporters are fighting as the year winds down. The other isn’t with another YouTube channel, but rather with YouTube itself.

Some of YouTube’s most prominent users are clashing with the site’s own depiction of its culture

Amid what seems to be an endlessly swirling cloud of controversy around PewDiePie, a new indicator has emerged as to which “side” of YouTube he represents, and how YouTube itself views him. On December 6, the site released its annual “Rewind” video, in which it looks back at the highlights of the year. The 2018 video is an effusively rosy, objectively wince-inducing 8-minute lovefest, with a notably diverse cast celebrating everything from K-pop to drag queens, working moms, mental health vloggers, and the Baby Shark meme.

As YouTube pointed out in a press release, Rewind 2018 “features over 100 of YouTube’s top creators.” It does not, however, feature PewDiePie in any capacity. The omission incensed PewDiePie’s followers, as well as the followers of other YouTube creators who were left out. As a result, the video, within a matter of days, has rapidly overtaken an 8-year-old Justin Bieber single to become the most-disliked video in YouTube history.

YouTube has not responded to a request for comment. But it’s worth noting that this year’s Rewind project represented an attempt by the site to do something different. “The YouTube community has always been front and center in Rewind,” the company said in a press release, “but this year we took this collaboration to a new level. This year, we gave control to YouTube creators and the YouTube community, taking direction for the storyline of the video from this new generation of talent and even from the YouTube comments section itself.”

The wry acknowledgment from YouTube that its 2018 Rewind video was intended to wrest the annual project from the dictates of the comments section wasn’t without prescience. As the dislikes skyrocketed, one of the creators who participated in the video, popular tech blogger Marques Brownlee, articulated crucial ways in which the 2018 edition illustrates a core difference between YouTube’s corporate vision for the platform and that of its creators:

Creators want YouTube Rewind to be a celebration of YouTubers and the biggest/best stuff on the platform that year.



YouTube wants Rewind to be a couple minutes they can show to advertisers and say “look at all the great stuff over here that you want to spend your dollars on!” — Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) December 10, 2018

Ok that's all I got for now. Go subscribe to @pewdiepie — Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) December 10, 2018

Again, part of the perceived problem among those who are angry over the video is that it omits many longstanding and popular YouTube creators — people like PewDiePie, Logan Paul, and Shane Dawson, all of whom rose to fame primarily through the platform but who have each cultivated controversy in various ways since.

Many seem to resent what one commenter described as the video’s emphasis on “memes and cultural relativism,” as opposed to a more overt emphasis on vloggers and personality-driven content. Other commenters have noted the video’s emphasis on non-YouTube-grown celebrities and content, as in a seemingly random appearance from Will Smith and the inclusion of HBO’s Last Week Tonight host, John Oliver.

Of course, the problem with including people like PewDiePie and Logan Paul is that in so doing, YouTube would be sending a message that it endorses their highly controversial antics — which in PewDiePie’s case comes with a hefty dose of troubling alt-right flirtation.

In other words, YouTube is facing a true dilemma: It wants to champion its grassroots creators, but it wants to ignore any controversial or creatively limited vloggers who’ve risen to the top as a result of having won followers’ hearts and surmounted its tricky recommendation algorithms, only to prove scandalous or difficult to integrate into YouTube’s positive public face.

But when these highly influential creators come with followers who are willing to hack, troll, and campaign in their names, it’s a reminder to all of us that, love it or hate it, the influence of YouTube itself over its nearly 2 billion monthly visitors is impossible to ignore.