The Real Problem With Shane Dawson

this video is sponsored by an earnest introduction earnest introductions let them know where your heart is at before you post their faves okay so this is probably the most conflicted i've ever felt about making a video i want to talk about the shane situation but it's scary uh for a couple of reasons for one he has a very big audience and a fan base that's pretty ready to defend him at every corner so um opening myself up to that uh doesn't sound fun and two i don't think shane is a monster i really don't by all accounts from both his friends and even mutual friends of ours he's a well-meaning guy who has learned and wants to continue to learn and grow from his past mistakes but that's exactly the reason i'm making this video i'm making this video because of the gaps that i've observed in shane's past apologies his audience's misunderstanding of the criticisms levied against shane and the gaps that i've observed in the discourse on youtube about shane this isn't a video about the platforming or cancel culture shane isn't going to go away nor do i want him to quite the opposite actually he commands a very large audience and i genuinely believe that he has the power to use his past mistakes to educate that audience in order for the youtube community to grow towards a better future i think it's important to understand the foundation that shane and to a much larger extent youtube itself were built upon i'm just gonna say it some of that foundation isn't so good it's only by addressing it head on that we can remedy this issue systemically because if we don't fix these underlying issues then we'll just be playing a game of whack-a-mole whenever something pops up on the platform that we don't like so with all that being said let's roast shane and youtube welcome back to the internet was a mistake i'm your host unchecked power today i want to talk about the situation with shane dawson uh which has been hotly discussed for a minute now but after watching d'angelo wallace's thorough examination of shane's past content i couldn't help but have thoughts as a black creator myself who's essentially grown up on the platform i had a front row seat to the rise of shane dawson tv and i just gotta say it was so refreshing to see someone reach such heights who look just like me representation matters also surprise i'm black there's always someone who had no idea leave your troubling takes on race in the comments down below all jokes aside uh shane's content just wasn't my thing in 2007 when i was 14 years old i would much rather listen to hank green saying about the release of the long-awaited seventh harry potter book by noted female anatomy expert jk rowling shane's videos were featured on the front page for years and for years i didn't click on them because i i didn't need to know any ghetto girl makeup tips shout out to all my ghetto girls out there that was until i became obsessed with the tanacon dumpster fire and uh i watched i watched every video i could find about that including shane series you always at which point i was a little confused as to how he got from point a to point b today shane is among the most criticized people on the platform some of this criticism stems from his newer videos which have contributed to the image rehabilitation of white creators who have all in their own unique way said the n-word but the majority of the critique comes from shane's content of a long begotten era of youtube the ancient historic year of um i don't know like 2010 ish before we get too deep into this i want to give a bit of a warning because shane's past content contains blackface other racist jokes sexualizing minors jokes about abuse and uh pretty much everything else you could be upset about i'll be censoring what makes sense because you can find it uncensored in d'angelo's video thanks d'angelo but don't say i didn't warn you my goal is not to re-traumatize anyone especially since the the worst of the receipts are already pretty well documented i'm also censoring stuff because i want to try and monetize this video and donate um all the money it makes to rain which is an organization that helps victims of abuse which reminds me i forgot to update you about the money that we raised in the papa john's video for black lives matter causes uh we raised about two grand so that's exciting and i'll leave in the description where where that money went and some links in case you want to donate and also i just wanted to say thank you for all the support um i'm a i'm a lucky guy hey what's up you guys shane's first apology that i know about occurred in 2014 when he was 26 and this to my understanding was like four to six years after he first received criticism for his use of blackface i couldn't possibly imagine any other apologies existing before this time because like three days before he recorded this he was still snapping back at people on twitter why aren't we talking about shane dawson dressing up in blackface that's not blackface i was playing wendy williams and doing it justice there's a big difference so real quick there's no difference also who made you the expert in his first apology he talks about how he just learned what blackface was a month ago i'm gonna be honest i didn't really know what it was up until literally a month ago i knew the term i didn't quite know any of the historical you know background it's incredible that he says that he's just learned what it is because he's been criticized for it for years he also claims that no one in his audience took issue with it which didn't offend my audience i never got comments about it it was fine which is a is a weak defense for a number of reasons one his audience is very young and that is an undeniable fact that shane himself is aware of and they said so what do you do and i said oh i make comedy for kids two youtube is an echo chamber built to show you things that you agree with and this is your audience of course the people who came to your channel for blackface are not gonna have an issue with blackface what do you mean you don't eat meat everyone who comes into my deli loves a good salam three people in the comments definitely did have a problem with it because shane was widely criticized at the time for his behavior and he says in this apology video that he ignored all the criticism against him so like pick a narrative man for a long time over the last seven years i've once in a while once a year i get kind of a bombarded on twitter with you know change races change races and they'll post screen caps and blog posts and all these things and i ignore it based on the fact that three days prior to this he was still defending his use of blackface i can only imagine that he was making this apology to to save face with his own audience and it also seems to line up with an la times review of the movie that he was promoting at the time the thing that really was hard too is you know the movie just came out and a review came out about it that wasn't even about the movie it was about me because the movie is not offensive the script is not that raunchy somebody out there is a rat and they're going around saying this is the raunchiest movie ever made and it's pissing me off he says look i'm going to be honest with you i've had clients that have gone online watch shane's stuff and said i don't want to be a part of that when i was an actor i was auditioning for everything i don't quite understand the logic of being picky when you have no job come on you can go somewhere awesome you know like kentucky you know you're allowed with your dog there don't talk about that don't talk about that don't talk about that he also promotes in this apology for some reason like read the room the movie's funny it's not it's you know but now a lot of people aren't going to give it a chance because they think it's going to be horrible and offensive and it's really not not cool got a lot of really negative reviews shane's movie got eviscerated in the critical landscape i mean absolutely destroyed one review said that if you enjoy my movie you must be a sociopath that was in the los angeles times for me reviews don't really mean whether a movie is good this video is not about the movie by the way don't i'm not trying to promote it dear god now it looks like i am oh god varus the brand deal please um but that does remind me you can follow me on instagram and twitter at jarvis always be plugging see shane taught me something it's a mutual exchange he also weirdly can't figure out how to not monetize his video which i find hilarious first of all i'm not doing this video for money or i'm not putting ads on this video there was like a three second ad for my movie but that's because that's on all my videos and i can't do anything about that he's gone on in later apologies to confirm this but the fact that he is mostly making this video to protect his own bag will serve as a theme the video is also super defensive because of my videos now every choice i make people are going to jump right to racist it's so weird that everyone calls me racist when i do something racist what's that about of course i hired him he's a racist homophobic awful human he's also not even funnier than y'all is the thing also the review of his movie calls him out for way more than just blackface but he's kind of just cherry-picked this particular thing because there's no racism in the movie there's a black hobo eating his own [ __ ] i didn't cast him i didn't ask for a black hobo i i [ __ ] auditioned every race every kind of hobo look i'm an equal opportunity hobo employer it's been mentioned many many times is a problem for people so if we just like lose that i'm just saying i'm not taking anything out of the movie to please a bunch of out of work actors in pittsburgh you should be lucky to get an audition for a feature film i'm angry that we're finding out about this two days before we start filming i don't know i'm gonna go shane stop it you can't go we have too much to do i'm gonna go and i'm gonna do this in my hotel also i know it's 2015 but let's uh let's not use hobo to talk about homeless people by the way the whole video is poorly planned out as his apologies often are okay um i don't really know how to do this video um i didn't really plan it out i didn't like write it down and the majority of the time is spent with him making excuses for like the circumstances of the video as if he wasn't the one who like filmed and edited this i'm sorry my brain is melted i've been i literally i i was on a plane when i was reading all these blog posts and stuff and i lit i would start panicking i like kind of threw up a little bit in my mouth i i just i wanted to make a video right then but i was in the middle of a plane and then the man next to me was coughing and he kind of threw up a little bit and it was weird why are you in such a hurry my camera's going to turn on at 4 pm sharp and i've got to be there be square shane's defense of using blackface is that he's playing a character i just knew in my head i was like that's not what i'm doing because what i'm doing is i'm playing wendy williams which a lot of the screencaps that are going around are of me playing wendy williams and me playing raven simone and chris brown and stuff so for me in my head i was just like oh no i'm just becoming the character i'm not making fun of them for being black i'm just looking like that which is a funny justification to me because it's obvious like we know we know you're playing a character shade you're not actually black though he may be confused about that thank you detail detail what's up what's up detail he also sidesteps the fact that all the actual black people in his videos are just punchlines or look dumb or are just there to like make the audience okay with his use of the n-word the most insidious part of shane's comedy is that he's consistently just putting down people of color they're always the butt of the joke shauna i really want her to have a channel and she has a lot of fans and like she doesn't know what she's doing she doesn't know how to make a video she's black she doesn't even know how to she just slaps her keyboard if you are building a brand on this sort of humor which i would argue shane is then you can't be surprised that like later on it comes out that the entire platform that you've built is built on rotten foundation by the way for all the people saying it was a different time which i'll talk about more later people were protesting and demonstrating against eminem in the late 90s and early 2000s for all of the outlandish he was saying and the one line that eminem wouldn't cross is saying the n word so just food for thought in defense of his comedic sensibilities he says that he was raised on sarah silverman and you know listen there's a lot of videos i've done that are offensive i've done a lot of jokes about things people don't joke about well i mean you know i grew up i was raised on sarah silverman someone who did a blackface sketch that was critical of blackface something that uh shane has never done by the way and she still saw a ton of backlash for it so i don't know if it's the best example i cannot believe that i am having to make this video i cannot believe that this is happening i shane's second apology that i'm aware of comes four years later uh when shane is 30 years old and it's the first time he's addressing his history with sexualizing children but instead of talking about the root of the problem and the root of the criticism he sidesteps that to debunk this specific doctored clip that people were using to call him a pedophile first of all i don't understand why anybody would be turned on by that but that's the first good thing you said but they were sexy i'm kidding okay back to the instagram uh i wanted to play that clip in full i mean that moment especially in full just for context because that seems to be missing nowadays so there's a clip of shane on an old podcast sexualizing a child for humor that's an undeniable fact shane in his apology focuses on the fact that this clip was doctored to make him look bad and taken out of context despite the fact that in context it still makes him look bad like d'angelo plays the full clip in full context um in in his video and shane doesn't uh which is kind of funny here's my justification for pedophilia i can't okay first of all let me just say having sex with children or touching children or anything of that nature is terrible should not but here's my thing people have foot fetishes people have fetishes about you know everything and there's websites on the internet where they can look at that weird creepy [ __ ] and jerk off to it okay fine everybody do your thing so why is it when somebody looks at a google's like naked baby on google and jerks off to it they can get arrested i don't understand because but the energy that shane is coming at us with is that we all banded together to call shane a pedophile with like a shoestring's worth of evidence which is just not what happened i'm gonna start by saying i am not a [ __ ] pedophile hey man uh don't yell at me i didn't do anything why are you mad at me what chain is doing here and it's something that he does a lot is committing a logical fallacy known as a straw man which is where you misrepresent someone's argument against you so that it's easier to defeat for example there's a lot of good faith criticism against shane for sexualizing minors and his behavior with underage fans okay so on daily booth i asked you guys to show me your best face that was the day i was on a lot of vicodin sounded like a fun game at the time let's look at some of the fun pictures oh oh she's done this before i'm guessing by this picture she likes to be raped but in this video he focuses on i don't know somebody who's saying that because his boyfriend has a baby face and his ex-girlfriend has a baby face that he's a pedophile like no one is really making that argument in good faith because one of their pieces of proof was taking a picture of me and ryland my boyfriend and then a picture of me and lisa my ex circling their faces and saying they look like babies they have baby faces shane's a pedophile that's what you want to use this apology to address what shane should be doing is apologizing for sexualizing children but that's a far less defensible behavior so he resorts to something that's a little bit easier uh for his audience to get on board with this is also something that has been a pattern for shane for a long time and to this day he still hasn't addressed it so um if you're if you're wondering why people keep bringing it up it's because you you keep not addressing it this is why i shane yaw my real name go on record saying i am not a [ __ ] pedophile hey you don't have to go on record we have you on record you kissed the 12 year old girl on the lips on record swapped gum with another teen fan on record um i want him to chew that gum and then give it to me and you make inappropriate jokes to the teenagers in your live streams on record oh my god can you guys see my peeps i was like itching myself and i'm not wearing any pants then i gotta realize i was on camera so you just made a joke about exposing yourself to your audience with full knowledge that your audience is fairly young um that's a lapse in judgment at best to me but it's a pattern it happens time and time again and maybe this humor could be acceptable if it was like eric andre or something on adult swim where the audience is not expected to be children but they're also not doing live streams with their fans in a a live stream with a couple hundred fans that's a there's a power dynamic that's being exploited and you seem to know that it's a pattern this is a bad idea anytime i do these tiny chats i always say something or show something this is weird because after that if you look in the chat you can see a girl saying totally fine with you doing inappropriate stuff ha ha which kind of speaks to the normalization of this behavior with his audience maybe this person is an outlier maybe you didn't see the message uh but it's it's troubling to me that this environment is being created for young girls it's not like you're just learning now that this is inappropriate you knew at the time just got home from the hospital alley cake why did somebody get too rough with you last night oh my god i'm looking at your profile picture and you're like 12 years old that was too far did somebody get really rough with me last night uh someone in the sixth grade took you to the 12th grade so why are you treating us like we're crazy when when we have valid criticisms against you that's manipulation also it's absurd to me to take a tone so confrontational on allegations so serious um or for example they're saying oh shane talked about googling naked babies which by the way i never did like i was making a joke and telling a story and lying and being like well i googled naked of course i didn't google [ __ ] naked babies i'm busy i don't have time to google naked babies and that's gross and weird so when everyone yourself included is talking about how much you've changed it's just a tough pill to swallow with this stuff out there unaddressed i also think that continuing to call this stuff bad jokes really diminishes the impact of of what's going on there's a pattern of behavior that could be harmful to his fans and even people who aren't fans because it creates a standard of behavior that's normalized because of you know shane's power position do you have fans who um want to [ __ ] you like but young like a lot of these young girls like 12 years old in my mouth like all this and i just don't see him acknowledging that impact though we will get to the most recent apology it just feels like this is damage control once again because it's mostly about how the situation's affecting him rather than rather than victims of his actions and i'm not going to turn this into like a metoo moment or like a feel bad i'm not going to turn this into that because that's not what i'm trying to do with this it triggers me listening to that clip so listening to me joking about it [ __ ] me up i've been in such a bad place before there's apparently this term called performative contrition which is where you have like over self-deprecating apologies to kind of emotionally manipulate the audience to be on your side and to feel bad for you that's present all over the place in these apologies honestly what happened today was i read it i actually read a blog about me and about all the [ __ ] i've done and i i read the tweets usually i just ignore them or write something sassy and i read them and it really [ __ ] me up and really broke my heart also he's always talking about how he's apologized before but like where and when if you've been around for a while you know that i've done this before um i've apologized many times for videos because i could only find three apologies and if your apologies are hard to find where you address certain issues then uh i don't think that's on us also in in 2014 you said you were ignoring everything up until this point in 2018 you acknowledged previous apologies but the only previous apology that exists is for blackface and you've never addressed the sexualization of minors thing until 2018 so like do you think that i'm sorry apol absolves you of all blame hi if you've been watching me for a while then you know that i have done a lot of things in my past this brings us to the third and final apology as of um august 6th at 12 12 p.m pst as deangelo notes in his video this thread came out in response to like a big twitter thread about shane in his past but kind of on the same day as another big thread with a bunch of other stuff in it so he doesn't really get to acknowledging a lot of the stuff still also he blows up on tati like four days after this so it really undoes the whole thing shane's most recent apology certainly does accomplish more than the previous ones but it does lean on some familiar tropes like making us feel bad for him my childhood my past i've had a lot of pain i've had a lot of bad things happen to me and um there's uh making us feel bad for him that's the level at which i have been lately just feeling very awful about myself and last but not least uh making us feel bad for him i hate that person so much shane buddy pal no one is asking for you to hate yourself i'm willing to lose everything no one is asking for you to lose everything or at least i'm not i maybe some people are but i think that that would be the easy way out people you know i've been guilty of this people tend to get defensive when they're accused of hurting someone else and then it becomes about proving to everyone that you're a good person but that that's not the point it's not about you dude taking accountability doesn't mean feeling bad about what you've done it's about making it right for example i think it would be wonderful if you used your platform to educate like you've mentioned that you want to do but by talking about how bad you feel it really keeps the spotlight on you rather than shining it on the people who've been hurt by your past actions and behavior we'll tackle this apology in parts it starts with racism i can't even imagine what it would be like to be black and to see this white [ __ ] guy do blackface and the whole internet at that time being like lol hi it's me i was there and black also this is actually great to acknowledge i just wish every admission of fault wasn't couched with like a call for sympathy i don't know how to even fully apologize because it almost it seems like something that is uh irredeemable uh you know maybe just try apologizing please life is long and i think a genuine apology that truly addresses the core of where this criticism is coming from can go a long way and then we're back to shane feeling bad for shane i should lose everything for that thankfully shane seems to now be acknowledging that he's normalized racism for an audience that wouldn't challenge him on it it made young people at the time who were watching me think it was okay great now do that for the sexualization of minors he as a white person wearing a wig and playing a character and doing stereotypes and then saying the n-word is something that i should have probably lost my career for yeah probably youtube where were you at that basically happened to sam pepper after a petition that a bunch of big creators co-signed made it to youtube to take down one video that he made depicting sexual assault so we know that it was possible at the time but despite the fact that hate speech has been against youtube's community guidelines since day one it's never really been enforced with shane dawson i don't use any racial slurs in my life i've never used a racial slur in anger uh just to note you shouldn't have to qualify this i've never used a racial slur on a wednesday in in february of 2018. i mean i've watched so many videos on the history of blackface and how it was created to make fun of black people to make them feel less than and the fact that i in some way was a part of that in some way i've got to give shane some credit for addressing the situation that happened a few years back with a creator who's wonderful by the name of francesca ramsey now there was one person who really tried to get through to me for a long time and her name is chescaleigh and she tweeted me and we got into fights back and forth and my audience at the time was saying racist things to her and it was so toxic and i'm so sorry but once again i feel like the situation was misrepresented from hearing shane talk about their disagreements you don't really get the gist of it but when you read the tweets it's like oh it's pretty upsetting honestly what is your deal i just don't get it you have been attacking me for like three years okay strong words attacking not the same as criticism i think that future shane eventually learns this one of my biggest problems was thinking that criticism is being attacked also it's not like she tagged him so he's basically responding confidently to a subtweet you'll also notice that this was one day after his first apology but you know he grew a lot in that 24 hours i get that you disagree with my content and i 100 understand that but the constant tweets are just so negative and hateful the constant tweets about my racism are so negative and hateful why can't you just suffer in silence just like a whole victim blame me if you ask me and i have never ever favorited a tweet of someone telling you to kill yourself i'm not clear if that was an accusation that was made or just like a random statement he's making i'm not even i'm not even kidding uh but it just seems out of the blue and i called you a youtube [ __ ] because you're attention seeking not because you're a [ __ ] gosh i called you a [ __ ] because you're an attention [ __ ] not because you're a [ __ ] [ __ ] stop misrepresenting me i'm sorry for offending you and i've apologized to the community numerous times this is before his first apology so i'm like where are these apologies you need to let the hate go girl god i feel gaslit by this tweet then you know he goes through 24 hours of rapid growth and completely changes the person and makes his apology video um after which he tweets francesca who asked him not to mention her name i saw your tweet about leaving your name out after i uploaded sorry about that wasn't trying to start oh whoopsie my mistake i'm just completely ignorant of the inadvertent harassment that can happen if i mention your name in a negative light in one of my videos ah gosh sure wish i could take it down and re-upload it but unfortunately my bottom line is more important than your well-being so my hands are tied francesca's spoken to shane on a number of occasions but i just want to share the story from like i think the the period of 2014 when he made this first apology shane and i skyped for about three hours and most of it was spent with shane crying and telling me how bad he felt and how he didn't want me to hate him i felt backed into a corner i assured him i didn't hate him or anyone i just wanted him to understand how what he'd done was harmful it's clear that what really troubles him is like how he's perceived and not like the harm that he's doing and it seems like he's like not able to grasp that but but hopefully like he does mention this you know in his his most recent apology so hopefully he's starting to get there but francesca mentions that she's reached out to him in the past and tried to discourage him from you know propping up particularly troublesome figures uh to which she was met with no response so so do you get a sense of what sort of harassment creators can receive when they criticize someone with such a defensive fan base francesca posted one of the emails she got from a shane fan back in the day and i'm just gonna read it to you speaking out against racism speaking you bash people on their twitter humiliate them insult them shane dawson being the example racism the dude has many black friends and fans of different ethnicities has he ever mistreated someone because of the color of their skin or their nationality or religion not even once i'm not here to criticize you uh mission failed since i know you have good intentions but let me just say this and now for the psd resistance you and i both know white people in the entertainment business are the most oppressed group in society one small slip and they will be accused of racism homophobia sexism etc aren't you taking this way too far have you actually met shane dawson in real life to be fair he has a point one small slip one hundred videos in blackface and you're accusing this guy of racism i mean come on don't you think that's taking it a little too far now i know this email is old but it's indicative still of the way that fans today defend shane dawson and i think that he shares some responsibility in how his audience is acting on his behalf it's on him to educate his audience that criticism against him is not an attack against him and he's mentioned that in his most recent video but like clearly the message isn't seeping in because these fans feel like they're losing their favorite creator due to some sort of unfair situation and that's just not what's happening here he wields a lot of power as i do with my platform and with great power comes great responsibility has uncle ben taught us nothing oh i i meant spider-man but that works weirdly um have uncle ben's taught us nothing here's another shane apologist from 2020 for those who don't believe me this stuff still goes on he literally asks a child to twerk for him and other things i love you too can you twerk for us he had a forum where some of his underage audience would send him inappropriate photos that he would literally ask for don't throw stones unless you carry absolutely none yourself period period damn so if we've all made mistakes in our lives then we can't criticize anyone no that doesn't seem right to me he made mistakes he's apologized and i don't believe that's who he is today i wasn't perfect 10 years ago i bet you weren't either okay yeah like not all mistakes are created equal but go off queen also has he apologized maybe you accepted his apology but uh jada pinkett smith did not and i'm with jada on this one as of 2017 which is once again recently he was still making videos that sidestepped criticism of him like there's a video of him reacting to hate videos with jeffree star uh a literal angel who's done nothing wrong they include this video that someone made in 2010 called why i hate shane dawson which i watched and is full of valid criticisms that we are still making of shane dawson to this day the frustration comes from the younger places like the nickelodeons and stuff they know about me and they like me and they they want to do something with me but they also know i can't change what i do i can't tone it down i don't want to dumb it but if you want to get between these hits you better be packing between your wallet lips homie so that was 10 years ago just just saying that this is out there and he literally skips every example of problematic chains done in that video and just makes jokes about the way the guy looks hello everybody oh pretty much since i've started this channel everyone has asked me the same question over are you gonna kill somebody that's who's next he had a great opportunity to use his platform to address bad stuff that he's done in the past and how he's changed from that directly and uh he did none of it he showed none of the receipts and all he did was talk about how the guy in the video looks scary and he is but that's not the point francesca's story tells us that people have made the effort to educate shane in good faith people far more eloquent than myself but that education has fallen on deaf ears so why exactly are we just supposed to believe that he's changed um where was i uh okay third apology that was completely undone by the live stream four days later because you message he moves on to talk about his sexualization of minors where he basically just rehashes this 2018 apology where he talks about how the clip was altered they cut out all the parts where i said you know pedophilia is disgusting and they put it together and it made it seem like i was you know talking about how it's normal and reminder it's still bad in context so gross i would never say that but also i shouldn't have been joking about it anyways and he begins to own up to it uh until once again making it about himself my childhood my past i've had a lot of pain i've had a lot of bad things happen to me then it seems that his take away from the situation where he made sexually inappropriate comments to his cousin yeah do we want to talk to you we want to explain what sex is we did get really quiet oh where's the other peep we should probably we'll just use please peeps okay well one peep and then we'll use you oh okay so i'll just pretend like that's you know i mean that works lucy this happens see and then and then you're so happy when you're an adult i can't believe i'm endorsing how old are you i'm 12. this feels very you know what are you no you're not on your period you believe is that it was a family moment that he shouldn't have shared online because i posted it on the internet for everyone not just my family that wasn't i posted like a stupid weird family moment for everyone ah which doesn't quite feel right calling it a stupid weird family moment doesn't really help anyone except for your own image and it ignores the fact that this is a pattern like did he just forget that this is a thing that he did more than once he talks about it like he just this one clip surfaced but there's like so many clips you know what you should do to dry yourself off go dance on top of that table over there yeah okay i mean like we don't want it more hip action yeah we don't want to have sex with you yet this just makes it feel like you're addressing it because you got caught because you're not really addressing the whole the problem not to mention the rampant inappropriate comments about children that you are not related to all right now it's time to see some hot sexy [ __ ] wearing my hot topic shirts damn oh if i justine wasn't watching i would rap all of you of course people will say that it was a different time but to my knowledge nothing at the time was to this degree you know like wheezywaiter wasn't out there doing blackface congrats on a million subscribers by the way craig well deserved and yes there was edgy humor at the time as there is today but that doesn't excuse it because you could also argue that shane was in breach of youtube's community guidelines about sexualizing minors uh which had been in place before shane started making this content but it seems like once again no action was taken despite a number of examples but who am i kidding youtube in 2020 is still showing preferential treatment with regard to the rules shane goes on to talk about how he's changed and the beauty drama which you know doesn't go over well considering what happens four days later also and this is something that i find a little bit weird across the board and i'm not sure if it's fair uh he mentions his merch in a couple of apologies and uh you know right now if you look at his social media during his highly publicized absence from youtube you get like you see merch links in and that seems like optically it's like you i um i don't know that one i'm still i'm still undecided but it's a weird look for sure so where does youtube come in in all of this uh everywhere actually they've kind of just outright supported chain from the very beginning and you'll notice in the old days he had a lot of placements on the front page which at the time i think was before the algorithm so they were like placed there manually though i could be wrong about this and only recently like a few weeks ago or whatever did youtube take any action uh regarding shane's content and they suspended ads on his channels for like this content that's many many years old which is weird to me because it's like you know you know that he posted this stuff on youtube like he was here the whole time it's not like one of those situations where you hire someone and then you later find out that they love to eat other people's lunches and you're like ah lunch time is ruined if only we'd done more research youtube and the youtube community at large save for the people who did criticize shane at the time have enabled shane and his content time and time again so to me deplatforming him which i don't think will happen is hypocritical because youtube was complicit in creating his platform in the first place i think youtube needs shane dawson to solve the shane dawson problem just like youtube needed shane back in the day as it looked the other way whenever shannane was coming to town or whatever she did again i didn't watch the videos throwing shane under the bus now would just serve to spare youtube pr and do nothing to solve the underlying issue shane's old content is just a symptom of a bigger thing i'm not trying to say that shane isn't independently responsible for his own behavior because he is but i also think it's important for youtube to acknowledge who it gives a platform and how it promotes those creators jstation and a lot of those like weird animated stories are harmful examples of content that still exists on the platform and isn't technically breaking any rules in quotes though it kind of it seems like it is to me youtube is like any action that they've taken in situations like these has felt very slow if they've taken any action at all it's as if youtube only responds when there's like a petition or somebody gets arrested i think that youtube should also be mindful of its algorithm and the incentives that are in place and how like from a human psychology standpoint those incentives might drive people to do bad things because if youtube doesn't step in to like stop that vicious cycle of content at any point we're gonna get erased at the bottom where at least somebody is gonna be making the the worst [ __ ] imaginable and it's just going to sit there bottom dwelling on the platform and we as a community on youtube should be mindful of this and try to take action more in the moment rather than trying to like make up for things years later all kinds of community and industry leaders propped up shane back in the day despite the fact that his content was pretty objectionable i i found some reference to like a 2012 vidcon performance that was uh harrowing by all accounts i can't if anyone knows about that let me know i just have seen fragments on twitter this is crazy i don't know if many people have seen this but usa today ran a piece on shane in like 2010 and it now feels like a sketch out of like atlanta because it's so absurd to be profiling shane and talking about you know his successes while there's just this like racist ass content in the background meet shane dawson one of youtube's biggest stars dawson makes his living producing videos that run on youtube sharing in the ad revenues which produce more than enough income to afford the rental on this two bedroom home in north hollywood local youngsters are making a living online but who knows how look at this little emo haircut talk about business again we have not watched his content me talking about what happened during my week and then me throwing to skits and the skits are characters that i've completely made up my mom is this raging alcoholic who calls me you know gay every day and and my brother is cutting himself on the kitchen counter and it's just things that aren't even close to anything since shane is probably coming back to youtube soon at least according to his fiance's recent video where he apologized for shane a little bit and also it was untrending a lot of these clips date seven eight to ten years ago and i understand that shane's made highly insensitive and offensive jokes i want to be clear this is not just bad jokes from the past that isn't a fair characterization of the actions and it's unfair to the victims of the content and it's also unfair to shane because if he continues down that road he's just gonna continue to be met with backlash i know that shane has had to address his past more than most people probably in the world because every few years it comes back up to ruin him to cancel him he needs to show us that he fully understands everything that's been levied against him and what he intends to do moving forward i think about how we even got to this point and i'm reminded that i had a couple of ideas about videos about shane's content even some of the recent stuff but i was afraid of any criticizing of him being taken the wrong way by his audience that i don't want to invite that kind of chaos into my life but now it's kind of reached a point where i'm like i feel complicit if i don't say anything as a creator myself i feel responsible to my audience to let them know where i stand on things um especially when i think that it can help like push along the dialogue and i i think it's important for all audiences to know that harassing people um is not the move if i'm being attacked online don't feel the need to come to my defense with any sort of bad faith actions no harassment if you disagree with somebody you can have a discussion but there's a line uh between these like like hate messages and stuff and and threats of violence which were happening on shane's behalf whether he liked it or not because he didn't you know reign those people in at the time and so i think that that's a power that we all need to be really mindful of so here's to repairing the foundation of our platform good luck i guess and good luck to all of us that's all i had um it was a lot but thanks for watching if you did that and i'll see you later you

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,304,238

Rating: 4.9258909 out of 5

Keywords: jarvis, jarvis johnson, comedy

Id: F5EfFkTD0xc

Length: 44min 25sec (2665 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/chhrihanna]

Jarvis Johnson, a BIPOC creator who's also friends with D'Angelo Wallace btw, posted a 44 min vid about Shane's old content, apologies, and how he created a platform off of racism, misogyny, and pedophiliac content. I've been subscribed to him for a while, and I really enjoy his content---though I wasn't expecting him to create a video about Shane.

TW: Racism, pedophilia, clips of grooming at 34:47-35:25 (Shane & Lisa with cousin), 36 min (content with minors). He references D'Angelo's expose a couple of time during the video, the clips featured in Jarvis's video are more censored, and he's donating proceeds to RAINN.

So far in the first few minutes, Jarvis made an important point that even though Shane still has a massive fanbase, he has the opportunity to educate his viewers on why his past content was wrong & how he can strive toward being a less problematic person in the future.

ETA: 4:35 to 12:46 of the vid focuses on Shane's first Youtube apology (9/25/2014), and displays tweets where Shane justified blackface as "portraying characters" (Wendy Williams, etc.)---oh and by saying that he only learned what blackface was recently. From that, LA Time's review of Not Coolis also brought up, along with how Shane was still promoting it in the apology video. He also delves into the various examples of problematic jokes in the movie, and talks about how Shane's old videos had a disturbing pattern of making POC into jokes---either through his sketches or via the use of real POC to justify his racist "humor".

12:46 to 21:30 focuses on Shane's second apology (1/10/2018), and how he often employed strawman fallacies by claiming that clips of his predatory behavior was "taken out of context". One point that Jarvis talks about here is that even though Shane later claims that his past behavior was just "bad jokes", it ignores that this normalized the sexualization of children & racism to his fanbase AND that it also set that behavior up for the rest of YouTube as well.

Starting at 21:35, the video focuses on the most recent apology (6/26) and delves into how Shane uses self-deprecation to sway viewers toward his side & escape accountability. Even though he acknowledges that he normalized racism to his viewers, he doesn't mention how he's going to educate his fans on why his past content was wrong. Franchesca Ramsey and the harassment that she received from Shane's fans is mentioned around 26 to 30 min, as well as how his stans often interpret valid criticism as attacks against Shane. Here, Shane continues to claim that his clips of sexualizing minors are taken out of context (at 34:20-37 min).

From 37:30 onward, Jarvis talks about how Youtube was complicit in supporting Shane--either by always placing his videos on the front page pre-algorithm, to only recently demonetizing him despite the various examples of racism, misogyny, pedophilia, etc. Additionally, he brings up how deplatforming Shane would be hypocritical on Youtube's part since they helped him build that platform in the first place, and that Youtube still promotes other harmful creators like Jaystation, Jake Paul, Tana, etc. He also takes apart the "humor was different back then" excuse by displaying clips, Tweets, and articles from the early 2010s that criticized Shane Dawson & his content.

He ends the video by acknowledging that Ryland's video sets the tone for a future return from Shane, and that Shane needs to acknowledge what he's done to deserve criticism and prevent his fans from harassing more critics, etc.

[u/[deleted]]

I love Jarvis’ content. It’s so good.

[u/your_mind_aches]

I was watching Knives Out with my parents and completely missed that this was a thing that was happening. Jarvis is the first youtuber I actually knew already I've seen making a video on this! Come join us over on r/unnamedfanbase

[u/PrincessAngelina17]

He looks and sound like the rapper KYLE and I love him, his content is awesome and hilarious

[u/carnuatus]

Why... Is this post getting downvoted. 🙃

[u/lurkingvirgo]

I love Jarvis and I think he really did a great job in this video. Also I appreciate videos like his that aren't just trying to capitalize off the situation and actually raise unique and well thought out points about it.

[u/[deleted]]

im sorry considering all the other people actually calling shane out, jarvis missed here. how the fuck has shane shown that he has changed??? and yes he deserves to be deplatformed at this point. im so done with people