PewDiePie China Ban

Submission 15,208

Part of a series on PewDiePie. [View Related Entries]

Overview

PewDiePie China Ban refers to Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie becoming a blacklisted topic in the Chinese segment of the internet after he showed several Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh comparison memes in his video.

Background

On October 16th, 2019, YouTuber PewDiePie released an episode of his Meme Review series titled "Hong Kong vs Joker Ends Fortnite [MEME REVIEW] 👏 👏#68" in which he showed several Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh Comparisons memes and discussed Blizzard Boycott, South Park China Ban and other recent controversies involving China (shown below).^[1]

China is like that one person on Twitter that can't take any criticism and just blocks everyone.

On October 18th, 2019, a number of Hong Kong-based Twitter users reported that searches for PewDiePie no longer produced results on the Chinese social media (tweets shown below).^[2]^[3]

Notable Developments

On October 19th, 2019, PewDiePie released a video titled "PewDiePie Is BANNED in China," in which he shared the news of the ban.^[4]

Well boys, we did it! I'm banned from China. […] Now if you search anything PewDiePie-related on any Reddit-related forum in China, or YouTube-related videos, it will just be completely blank. […] It's kinda funny: I knew it was going to happen.

In the following hours, the news of the ban was covered by multiple news sources, including articles by Dexerto,^[5] Daily Mail^[6] and Daily Dot.^[7]

Online Reactions

On /r/PewdiepieSubmissions subreddit, multiple users posted memes about PewDiePie being blacklisted by China. For example, an October 19th, 2019, post by Redditor Satanskii received over 22,600 upvotes in three days (shown below, left).^[8] Another post by Redditor icewallowcome42069 gained over 36,000 upvotes in two days (shown below, center).^[9]