PewDiePie Breaks His Silence On His 'Shadowban'

Last week, fans of PewDiePie were deeply concerned for the future of their favorite YouTuber. It seemed as though PewDiePie had been "shadowbanned" by YouTube, which would have meant that YouTube would have severely restricted access to Pewds' content without outright banning him. Sure enough, PewDiePie's channel wasn't coming up in searches and his viewership numbers were at a low they haven't seen in years. Luckily, PewDiePie has been able to clear the air since then.

While PewDiePie's viewers were freaking out, YouTube reassured fans on Twitter that the company does not issue shadowbans. When reached for comment, YouTube also told Polygon, "We are hearing reports that PewDiePie's channel and some videos are not surfacing within searches. We are currently working on fixing the issue. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused."

It seems as though the unknown glitch has been fixed, as the view counts on PewDiePie's last few videos have gone up. While this is certainly good news for PewDiePie and his concerned fans, there still hasn't been much in the way of an explanation for last week's search issues and plummeting viewership numbers.

Although PewDiePie still doesn't have all of the answers, he did talk a bit about the issue in a recent video. The short version of the story is that everything is chill now, and YouTube has reassured PewDiePie that the problem has been taken care of. However, it seems as though PewDiePie was greatly amused by how quickly the shadowban rumor got out of hand.

What's interesting is how unbothered Pewds seemed to be by the whole fiasco, at least for the most part. PewDiePie read a message from one of his fans that informed him of the issue. The fan wrote about their concerns surrounding PewDiePie not showing up in any channel searches, as well as the low view count on his then-latest video. As PewDiePie began reading the message, he laughed and said that he had already forgotten about this debacle. Basically, it didn't seem to have bugged him in the way that it did some of his viewers. 

PewDiePie also made a few jokes about how people may have jumped to conclusions in this situation. In fact, he was clearly amused when the viewer writing in asked that he clear things up so that nobody would spread false rumors. PewDiePie quickly added, "like I am doing," referencing the person who wrote the message.

PewDiePie quickly caught his viewers up on the situation, explaining that he skipped an upload day when he saw that one of his videos had only received a little over 9,000 views. When it kept happening, PewDiePie began to believe there was some kind of glitch on YouTube's end. However, before he knew it, the rumor of his "shadowban" started to spread.

PewDiePie actually had some fun with the word "shadowban," which does sound hilariously ominous. "Shadowban!" he exclaimed. "They creep from the shadows, and then they ban you." 

He then reassured his fans that YouTube had supposedly fixed the glitch, whatever it was, but he did ask people to tell him if it happened again. "I didn't think they had shadowbanned me," said PewDiePie. "I assumed it was ... a glitch. But it begs the question: how, how does that happen? ... It didn't happen to anyone else. I asked around, like, 'Did this happen to anyone else?'"

On the positive side of things, Pewds' fans seemed to rally around him more than ever, both during and after the apparent shadowban. PewDiePie clearly wanted to get the most dramatic stuff out of the way at the top of this video, because he spent most of the rest of its runtime going through memes and birthday well-wishes from his fans. In one particularly impressive act of fandom, a viewer sent PewDiePie a video of a digital billboard they had paid for that wished PewDiePie and his wife Marzia a happy birthday. PewDiePie was clearly touched by the effort.

Fans will be happy to know that PewDiePie wasn't sneakily banned by YouTube. At the very least, it seems like Pewds and his viewers are able to laugh about the whole shadowbanning controversy. One of PewDiePie's viewers shared a clip of the YouTuber comedically stammering at the computer, along with a caption that read, "YouTube trying to explain why Pewds was shadowbanned."

However, PewDiePie's questions still stand: how did the search function issue occur and why didn't it happen to anyone else? Is there some unknown glitch in YouTube's search function that might have an effect on other content creators? Hopefully not, considering how important views are for YouTubers.