Context of Modern Media and Clickbait News

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the veil of "we’re doing the right thing; he’s a Nazi!" you just need a good, juicy headline and we’ll make some points that … it’ll get across to 98% of the people that aren’t going to fact check or dive deeper on it. Felix bring in the clicks outrage brings in the clicks get him in with the headline and whatever happens, after happens.”

Wired also posted an article by Emma Grey Ellis titled “Pewdiepie was always kinda a racist-but now he’s a hero to Nazis To PewDiePie’s”. But later the same day back peddled on the title which now reads “Fall Shows the Limits of ‘LOL JK’”. Yet Wired still has a linking tweet from the @wired Twitter account, "White Supremacists have a new hero and his name is Pewdiepie.” which you can still find as of today searching through twitter. While the headline is based on some semblance of fact, it is going to the extreme side of the topic. Defranco continues to say “but they know what they’re doing with that headline bating for those clicks with the worst possible description of the situation and if you go into the article itself it is just like a classic over-extension.” In the article, Ellis gives short blurbs about his videos and just linking to his content to give him even more views. Within the article, Ellis wrote "In this face-swapping video he repeatedly uses an image of actress Leslie Jones to represent Harambe, the gorilla killed in the Cincinnati zoo last year. I shouldn’t have to explain what’s wrong with that." Here Felix’s content once again is taken out of context. Because watching the video itself, it was not Felix’s creation, but that of a creation of Microsoft’s AI bot Project Murphy where you can type something in and random image would come up that had what you typed in face swapped with some other image. All these stretching posts just adding more fuel to the out of context fire for the people like us who may not have time to make their own investigations towards all these allegations that if any of the ire Pewdiepie is getting for being called a racists and an anti-Semite has a leg to stand on.

When we look at headlines and short snippets of an article on Twitter, we are seeing what they want us to see. These media outlets are taking things out of context and the people running the site don’t really care if all the facts back up what they are saying. Because to them if a story is that big it’s easy to push an article with a controversial headline about a famous person and flimsy evidence because they know that’s all they need to do to get people like me and you to click on those links and give them the ad revenue they desperately want. It’s not good journalism to make up a narrative and attack a creator on the internet. To take someone’s work and edit it to make what was supposed to be a satirical comedic look on the world and turn it into a narrative of their own creation for people to see as fact “Felix Kjellberg is a racist and anti-Semitic” look at all this evidence we conveniently edited together. It is morally wrong to twist someone’s words to make it look horrible and in doing so try and profit of all the negativity. I for one would not like something I did taken out of context by others and then have this image of me branded in their thoughts that something I did was that offensive and let that affect my life in bigger ways. Next time you see a headline about an attack on some content creator don’t just fall in line and believe everything being written take in the context of the original situation and then judge for yourself whether or not it’s justified to be mad.

Works Cited

Defranco, Philip. “MSM Tried To Destroy PewDiePie and OMG It Just Backfired! So Ridiculous...” YouTube, YouTube, 16 Feb. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtlDC1sZFSg. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.

Defranco, Philip. “Why People Are FREAKING OUT About The PewDiePie Disney Youtube Scandal.” YouTube, YouTube, 14 Feb. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzEt8U3Of2k. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.

Ellis, Emma Grey. “PewDiePie’s Fall Shows the Limits of ‘LOL JK.’” Wired, Conde Nast, 16 Feb. 2017, www.wired.com/2017/02/pewdiepie-racism-alt-right/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.

Guarino, Ben, and Kristine Phillips. “Anti-Semitic Jokes Cause YouTube, Disney to Distance Themselves from PewDiePie.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 14 Feb. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/14/pewdiepie-youtubes-most-popular-star-dropped-by-disney-over-anti-semitic-jokes/?utm_term=.980b59e67ad2. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.

Placido, Dani Di. “PewDiePie May Be Offensive, But Does He Really Deserve All The Hate?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 23 Feb. 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2017/02/17/pewdiepie-may-be-offensive-but-does-he-really-deserve-all-the-hate/#56cd510e6b72. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.

Winkler, Rolfe, et al. “Disney Severs Ties With YouTube Star PewDiePie After Anti-Semitic Posts.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 14 Feb. 2017, www.wsj.com/articles/disney-severs-ties-with-youtube-star-pewdiepie-after-anti-semitic-posts-1487034533. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.