PewDiePie hacks: what’s going on?

The Wall Street Journal was hacked today in the latest of a series of attacks by fans of YouTube star PewDiePie.

The US newspaper has launched an investigation after an article in the sponsored section of its online edition, WSJ.com, was edited to say that the publication would “like to apologize to pewdiepie” because he had been “misrepresented” by its journalists.

So what is going on?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Who is PewDiePie?

Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg is a 29-year-old Swedish comedian and video game commentator who registered a YouTube account under the name PewDiePie in 2010.

A year later, he dropped out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, where he was studying industrial economics and technology management, to focus on the channel. By 2013 he had the highest number of subscribers on the platform.

He has held the top spot ever since, currently boasting around 77 million subscribers.

Why all the hacks?

In recent months, Indian music and movie studio T-Series has come close to overtaking PewDiePie’s lead on YouTube, inspiring some fans to “mount stunts to attract new subscribers”, says the BBC.

Last month, people around the world were left baffled when their printers produced a poster supporting PewDiePie. An anonymous hacker, using the pseudonym TheHackerGiraffe, told Engadget that he had targeted a total of 50,000 printers by using a search engine for unsecured devices connected to the internet.

A similar hack occured again over the weekend, with printer owners told: “PewDiePie is in trouble and he needs your help to defeat T-Series!... Seriously. Fix your printer. It can be abused!”

What about The Wall Street Journal?

“PewDiePie fans have considered The Wall Street Journal to be an opponent of the creator’s since running an investigation into his channel in February 2017,” says The Verge.

The newspaper highlighted the use of anti-Semitic language in some of his videos, prompting him to lose a lucrative partnership deal with Disney-owned Maker Studios.

At the time, Kjellberg said that he “in no way” supported hateful ideologies and accused critics of being unable to differentiate between “what is a joke and what is actually problematic”.

Today, the post on WSJ.com appeared to apologise for misrepresenting him and said the publication would be sponsoring PewDiePie in his attempt to beat T-Series. The defaced page has since been taken down.

A representative for the paper said: “The page was owned by WSJ. Custom Solutions, a unit of the advertising arm, which is not affiliated with The Wall Street Journal newsroom.”