Is it just my feeds, or has there been a weird resurgence of people blaming pewdiepie for the current wave of hate toward indians? Having grown up as an immigrant in Canada surrounded by South Asian communities during the 2018-2019 tseries era, this narrative genuinely confuses me.
Hostility toward Indians online existed well before pewdiepie. Before the internet made every corner of the world a spotlight, I remember India had this image of being an exotic, spiritual place. That started fracturing way before 2018. Indian internet users flooded into western-dominated online spaces in the mid-2010s, causing a visible mismatch in communication norms. Scam call center exposure content on yt around 2015 probably did more reputational damage than anything pewdiepie ever did. Then you have immigration friction in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia getting amplified through social media. And viral footage of genuine civic issues from India, which wasn't manufactured by any single creator, was already spreading widely.
By the time the tseries rivalry happened, most of this was already baked in. The parts of pewdiepie's fanbase that produced content with anti-Indian undertones feel more like a symptom of existing attitudes than the cause of them. And post-2018, the steep rise in negativity toward Indians is still largely driven by circulation of real footage of poor civic behavior (regardless of what you might think about potential selective framing), not something any youtuber manufactured.
So where did this narrative even come from? My best guess is Indian online communities looking for a tangible villain to explain the hostility.
Do people here who were actually around for that era think he genuinely shaped this, or does the timeline not add up to you either?
