This week, in weird gaming news: Felix Kjellberg, also known as the ridiculously popular YouTuber PewDiePie recently had his Twitter account suspended for joking that he’d joined ISIS.
While jesting about joining a deadly terrorist group is usually laugh-a-minute stuff, Twitter obviously decided that wasn’t the case – but how did all this weirdness start?
Funnily enough, it all began because PewDiePie decided to remove his Twitter verification, ‘as a joke’ towards users who see it as a status symbol of some kind.
Soon after, an account parodying Sky News claimed that PewDiePie lost his verification because of ‘suspected relations with ISIS’.
As a result of that article, the YouTuber thought it’d be funny to reference the claims in a tweet, ‘confirming’ that he and fellow YouTuber JackSepticEye had indeed gone over to ISIS.
Obviously PewDiePie forgot that the internet is often a scary and very stupid place. His account was reinstated, but it really was (obviously) a whole lot of fuss over nothing.
PewDiePie explained all the recent madness himself in a new video, which you can watch below. In it, he confirms that everything is fine, and that perhaps social media is getting out of hand.
He said:
I’m fairly certain social media is making us all retarded. Yesterday, Twitter went full retard.
Instead of a blue checkmark, PewDiePie now has an image of a globe next to his name and all his tweets – something he also suggests his followers should get.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.