YouTube is such a staple in everyday life that it is hard to believe that just 15 years ago, we’d never heard of it. The video-sharing platform was founded on Valentine’s day back in 2015 and the first video ever uploaded was posted on April 23rd later that year. The site went public in May of 2005 and was quickly established as a solid platform when a skit from Saturday Night Live was uploaded. “Lazy Sunday” by The Lonely Island became one of the first viral videos in history. It is hard to believe that it was considered viral at the time, garnering a total of five million views in just under a year before it was removed.
By July of 2006, there was an estimated total of 65,000 videos uploaded daily. That is starkly different from the current figures. The latest report, which hit the internet around the time of YouTube’s 15 year anniversary asserts that there are about five billion videos uploaded daily. The ubiquitous tech conglomerate Google couldn’t resist getting a piece of the action once YouTube had proved itself and they acquired the company in October of 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock.
Some of the first people to gain real traction on the platform are names that are stored in a part of your mind that you don’t even remember is there, such as Smosh (the sketch comedy duo consisting of Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla), Venetian Princess (a pop parody channel headed by Jodie-Amy Rivera), and Ray William Johnson (a comedian that produced Tosh.0 style series Equals Three.
A few creators from the era are still around, such as Shane Dawson (ShaneDawsonTV at the time), Jenna Marbles, and Phillip DeFranco (then known as sxephil). YouTubers as we know them today started to emerge around 2010 and some of them have had incredible staying power. Part of this is because the audience has shifted significantly. YouTube has had a significant social impact and even though it started as most social media platforms do, a haven for younger users, now adults use it just as much.
YouTube has become a driving force for a lot of brands because of the older audience. However, over the past several years, we have seen the emergence of people becoming a brand. Creators like PewDiePie, Jenna Marbles, Jaclyn Hill, David Dobrik, and many others have flocked to the platform and are what’s now known as “influencers.” They produce their own content but work in conjunction with brands to promote their products and drive sales; many of them branch out from there and begin creating their own products. With millions of eyes on them a day, it’s not hard for people to actually make a living on the platform.
Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, was one of the first people to make a living on the platform. He was the first YouTuber in history to obtain over 100 million subscribers. He runs a “Let’s Play” channel where he plays video games with commentary. His net worth is estimated to be around $30 million. Many YouTube “beauty gurus” such as Jaclyn Hill, James Charles, and Huda Kattan have their own makeup lines. Almost everyone with a significant following on the platform sells merchandise ranging from everything like clothing and accessories to kitchen gadgets.
With all of the brand-sponsor opportunities, products, and even just the ad revenue they generate, plenty of creators on the platform have become millionaires from the privacy of their own homes. The problem with that, though, is that when you are your brand, you are a lot more susceptible to catastrophe. Large companies have people working around the clock to manage their public face but YouTubers don’t have that luxury. Many of them have had massive scandals over the years and have been effectively “canceled.”
Cancel culture is a strange creature that has reared its complicated head in society over the past few years. Social justice has taken center stage and while it is extremely important, nuance was shoved off into a broom closet at the same time. Cancel culture is the social practice of withdrawing all support from a public figure or celebrity after they do something that is problematic, which can range from mildly offensive (like making an ignorant or uninformed comment) to objectively repugnant (being racist or discriminatory). Cancel culture is interesting because people often fall from grace in an instant, with little regard to how long ago their issues came up, how they’ve addressed their problematic behavior, or how they have progressed afterward.
Sometimes this rapid cancellation is warranted; however, sometimes it just happens because the fishbowl of the internet can be a very toxic place. Regardless of what happened, it can be extremely difficult to ever come back from the depths of social exile. There are a few YouTubers who have been casualties by their own hand (or mouth) over the past decade. Even fewer have managed to stop their careers from careening off into failure.
In this article, we’re going to take a tempestuous journey into the lives of ten YouTubers who have been part of some of the most egregious social media scandals in recent years that somehow managed to rise out of the ashes and maintain their platform, or at least most of it. Whether or not it was deserved, here are ten YouTubers who survived cancel culture.
Note: This article contains multiple references to rape and sexual assault. It also contains racist and otherwise objectionable statements made by these YouTube influencers that are presented in their original state, with all grammatical errors in place.
Ace Family
The ACE Family is a YouTube channel run by Austin McBroom, an ex-basketball player and his partner Catherine Piaz. They were the subject of news articles back in 2018 that detailed how they were changing the landscape of vlogging. The family documents their lavish lifestyle through the video blogging style. The channel publishes mostly family-friendly content ranging from simple “day in the life” videos to pranks and challenge videos. They were one of the most popular channels in 2018 and maintain a subscriber count of just over 18 million today.
Their path has been rife with controversy. In June of 2018, the family held a charity event with the pledge to donate $100,000 towards a charity of their choosing. It was alleged that they ended up only donating $75,000 and pocketed the rest. After that, some old tweets posted by McBroom were dug up and they featured very racist, sexist, and simply distasteful comments such as “St. Louis is scaring me away from black girls….blondes with blue eyes are looking more appealing!” and “I need a massage, where are my lil asians?”
Shortly after those tweets were uncovered, the family posted a video describing a robbery that had taken place in their home, which was allegedly falsified to cover up the scandal of the tweets resurfacing and paint Austin and his family as the victims in the situation. Austin also posted a video in 2019 where he took a very young girl (supposedly a relative) to an adult store and purchased her a phallic lollipop.
There have been numerous other allegations of them scamming their audience for profit and most tragically, rape accusations were publicly made against Austin in October of 2019. The rape allegations were later revealed to be false and were made in order for the man who went public with it to get some money out of the family. It also surfaces with alarming frequency that Austin is a serial cheater.
Despite the overwhelming amount of allegations and compiled evidence against the family, they don’t seem to have been hurt by it at all. Austin repeatedly denies these allegations and their channel continues to be popular. At the time of writing: The Ace Family has posted four videos that have garnered roughly 8.8 million views combined.
Gabbie Hanna
Gabbie Hanna is a Youtuber, musician, and actress that got started on the short-form video platform Vine. She began posting Vines in 2013 and quickly amassed millions of followers; when Vine died, she took to Youtube. She now has what is generally known as a lifestyle channel. She posts vlogs, pranks, challenges, and occasionally, her music. She has a little more than six million subscribers to her channel.
She was one of the most unproblematic YouTubers for a long time. Even still, an early sign of the problems with her was that she was part of a tight-knit group of creators called the Vlog Squad. She appeared in most of the early videos, then suddenly disappeared. This is just not something that happens with the squad but nothing was ever said. They seemed to just go their separate ways.
Her scandal was more recent than that of The Ace Family. In November of 2019, Trisha Paytas (another Vlog Squad alum) made a video alleging that Gabbie Hanna was harassing her and more. Trisha explained that Gabbie had spread rumors about her having an incurable STI that have negatively impacted her relationship with her then-boyfriend Jason Nash. The worst part about it was that Gabbie spoke up in regard to the allegations and confirmed them! She spoke out in an Instagram post and said she had “heard that Trisha had herpes and was just looking out for a friend.”
Of course, fans sided with Trisha Paytas despite her own checkered past on the platform because it objectively was not Gabbie’s place to say anything like that. Another popular creator, Jessi Smiles, spoke out shortly after and talked about how Gabbi still very publicly hung around a man and his friends who had abused Jessi in the past. When Jessi brought this up, Gabbie apparently said: “well his friends didn’t rape you.”
She has ended up in the center of other smaller scandals that all lead back to the point: Gabbie doesn’t like to be held accountable and she has a history of manipulating people, her audience especially, to make herself look innocent. She also loves to say that her life is perfect and that she’s unbothered by the drama. Despite her refusal to properly address her problematic behavior, she is still doing quite well on YouTube. She posts videos weekly and they still pull in hundreds of thousands of views.
Jaclyn Hill
Jaclyn Hill is one of the original beauty channels on YouTube, posting her first videos as far back as 2011. She was quick to get very popular because she started out posting celebrity makeup tutorials and then her channel expanded to include other original looks, product reviews, and more. Now, her channel is a combination of these beauty videos and some lifestyle videos to keep her audience happy. Her history as a professional makeup artist combined with her nearly six million subscribers gives her a lot of authority in the beauty world.
Jaclyn Hill released her first exclusive product in 2015 in collaboration with BECCA cosmetics. The retailer Sephora sold over 25,000 units at breakneck speed; in just 20 minutes, Jaclyn’s Champagne Pop highlighter had broken sales records around the world. She also collaborated with the massively popular brand Morphe that year with a palette with her favorite shades. She has continued to collaborate with the Morphe brand, releasing a handful of other palettes as well as a bejeweled brush set.
It seemed only natural that Jaclyn would debut her own cosmetic line. Jaclyn Cosmetics was announced in a video she posted in May of 2019 and her first product was her “So Rich Lipstick” that would be available in 20 nude shades. Most of her audience was quick to raise up support for her new endeavor, except for a smattering of technical criticism based on her swatches and her opinion of what the perfect nude shade of lipstick was. Another thing that was a little bit suspicious is that none of her fellow “beau-Tubers” had received any products for review, which is customary.
Her lipsticks were first delivered into the hands of eager customers in early June after the announcement and began her unraveling. The lipsticks received a ton of reviews stating that their product had arrived damaged or broke quickly. Photos shared across the internet showed minor flaws like air bubbles and textural problems to more severe ones like mold and human hair in the product.
In response, Jaclyn apologized but all they did was fuel further backlash. She ended up deleting all of her social media except for her YouTube channel. After a significant hiatus of one month, she slowly got things evened out. She has posted nine videos over the past six months, with a combined view count close to 15,000,000.
James Charles
James Charles has made a splash in the headlines ever since the world first heard of him. He got started on YouTube back in 2014 but really began gaining traction in 2016 when his senior pictures for his high school yearbook went viral and he became the first male ambassador for the cosmetics brand CoverGirl. His channel is mostly centered around beauty and makeup; however, like most other YouTubers, he began posting other lifestyle content after he became popular. Right now, he has a little more than 17,500,000 subscribers.
Unfortunately for James, the largest section on his Wikipedia page is the one that details his controversies. His first one happened in 2017 when he tweeted a joke about hoping he didn’t catch Ebola before boarding a flight. That year, it also came out that the story that created his fame in the first place, about having his senior photos retaken with a ring light to show off his makeup, was also completely false.
The year 2019 was when things truly began to unravel. Early in the year, he made a comment about how he didn’t consider himself to be “fully gay” citing transgender men as examples. He faced considerable backlash for implying that trans men weren’t men, and he was quick to apologize. However, just a month later, his mentor and fellow YouTuber Tati Westbrook uploaded a video that was almost an hour-long discussing James Charles. She explained that James had a history of exploitation and sexual harassment and assault; what it boiled down to was that James used his “fame, power, and money to play with people’s emotions.”
Tati’s video went more than viral and brought the hammer down on James Charles. People that he was associated with in the past came forward with their own stories about him manipulating straight men to try to have sex with them, along with several other allegations. He became the first YouTuber to lose over a million subscribers in under 24 hours. Over the course of two weeks, James Charles lost several million subscribers, brands pulled deals with him, and his tour was canceled. His initial apology is one of the ten most disliked YouTube videos in history.
He was able to slowly bounce back after a long and dramatic hiatus. He has gained more than four million subscribers since the controversy and has resumed a regular uploading schedule.
Jeffree Star
Jeffree Star is one of the people whose photo belongs next to the word problematic in the dictionary. His career began in the early 2000s on MySpace; he was one of the most famous faces on the platform. He had a short music career as well. In 2014, he launched his brand Jeffree Star Cosmetics which prompted the start of his YouTube channel. He posts beauty-related videos such as makeup reviews and tutorials. He also posts a good amount of lifestyle videos. He currently has over 17,600,000 subscribers.
His entire career has been rife with scandals. In the early 2000s, he made some extremely vulgar racist comments about black women, yelling slurs and calling them apes. He also made a skit in 2006 where he talked about using battery acid to lighten a black girl’s skin. A new decade didn’t provide him with a fresh start, either. In 2013, a musician named Dahvie Vanity was accused of the rape of multiple underage girls. The two of them had worked together and were friends. Jeffree posted about it on Twitter, backing up everyone’s claims.
Later, he and Dahvie publicly made up and Jeffree rescinded his accusation. It was later revealed that Dahvie was, in fact, very guilty. In 2016, a fan of Jeffree’s posted a video airing some problems he’d had with one of Jeffree’s makeup products and Jeffree publicly attacked him. That same year, Jeffree “exposed” a fellow YouTuber (MakeupShayla) for making derogatory comments to another YouTuber which sparked a flurry of drama.
Shayla denied everything and Jeffree threatened to beat her to the ground and told her that she looked like a man. In 2017, a YouTuber named Jackie Aina made a video about Jeffree’s products and bringing up his old racist comments which was what caused the true cancellation spiral. It led to Jeffree exposing multiple people for racism in his own social circle and cutting ties with them.
Over the past five years, he has had plenty more instances of racism, poor makeup quality, and participating in so much drama. Despite all of the problems and the large scale canceling in 2017, he did a “redemption” series with Shane Dawson and repeatedly denies and apologizes for problems as they arise. He has remained largely successful. He has posted six videos in the past month with a combined view count of more than 40,000,000.
Laura Lee
Laura Lee is a makeup artist and YouTuber that got her start on the platform in 2013. Most of her videos are makeup tutorials and product reviews, as well as a few vlogs and other lifestyle videos. She started collaborating with cosmetic brands in 2016 when she released a palette. She has also worked with multiple other brands and even released her own line of branded cosmetics, Laura Lee Los Angeles. She has appeared in magazines and on television to promote her brand. She currently has just under 4.5 million subscribers on YouTube.
Laura Lee is one of the casualties of a controversy that started with Jeffree Star. In 2017, Jeffree tweeted that Laura’s soul was pure evil but the post has since been deleted. It wasn’t until Jeffree appeared in a series by Shane Dawson in 2018 where he acknowledged all of the people he’d cut ties with that Laura’s real controversy came up. One of them, Gabby Zamora, made multiple tweets that threw shade at Jeffree and called him racist. Laura Lee originally liked the tweets and that is what caused the backlash to begin.
Jeffree’s fans, and possibly Jeffree himself, didn’t take kindly to Laura fanning the flames by liking the posts and some tweets she had posted back in 2012 surfaced. Laura Lee had tweeted “Tip for all black people if you pull ur pants up you can run from the police faster” following the death of Trayvon Martin. She later called the tweet, along with several others, “vile and disgusting.” But not before posting a video that had nothing to do with the controversy after her previous comments were exposed.
Her failure to acknowledge the issues right away was quickly made worse when she chose to upload an apology video. In the video, Laura was accused of being insincere and even fake crying. She also chose to monetize the video, which made it seem even more insincere and proved that she was still trying to profit off of the disgusting situation she had found herself in. The fallout was significant. Laura deactivated her social media for a short period of time, lost more than a quarter of a million subscribers, and had several brands pull out of deals with her.
In 2019, Laura returned and apologized for the fake video and told her side of the story, and she has been slowly recovering since.
Logan Paul
Logan Paul is a YouTuber that came from the Vine platform. He started posting videos on Vine in 2013 and amassed a pretty significant following and he also created his YouTube channel that same year. He didn’t begin to actively use it until Vine was taken down but he has regularly posted since. His channel has typically consisted of clickbait, comedy, pranks, and vlogs. Logan has also worked as an actor on Law & Order: SVU, The Thinning, and a few others; he also has a podcast. Currently, he has almost 21 million subscribers.
Logan Paul has one of the largest controversies on this list and it changed the entire trajectory of his life. In December of 2017, Logan Paul uploaded a vlog of him exploring Japan. One of the places that he visited was in Aokigahara, a forest that has come to be known colloquially as the “suicide forest” because of its reputation. In the video, Logan showed a recently deceased man who had committed suicide in the forest. There were a lot of problems with the way he behaved in Japan but this was a major final straw. He did make efforts to protect the man’s identity and notify authorities.
People criticized Logan immediately. Popular creators called him out for being insensitive and there were petitions to get his channel completely removed. Logan deleted the video and posted an apology video within the two days following the uproarious backlash. YouTube responded as well.
The sequel to The Thinning, his series Logan Paul VS, and his appearances in the YouTube Red series Foursome were all halted. Logan Paul donated a million dollars to suicide prevention organizations across the country and took a month-long break from uploading videos. YouTube publicly ruled that Logan had not violated the platform’s three-strike policy and allowed his channel to remain, but he was suspended from generating any ad revenue until the end of February for his “pattern of behavior.”
Logan Paul began streaming on Twitch to continue making money from his content and resumed his regular schedule in February 2018; he has also participated in several professional boxing events since. Within a year, he had gotten even bigger on YouTube than he had been prior to the scandal. He has posted six videos in the past week that have a combined 22,700,000 views.
Nikita Dragun
Nikita Dragun is a makeup artist and model who has had her YouTube channel since 2014. Her channel focuses mainly on beauty and makeup as well as other lifestyle videos and vlogs. She is yet another content creator that was canceled as a result of her falling out with Jeffree Star; they used to be friends until the events of 2017 and 2018 unfolded. She has been a comparatively small channel throughout her tenure on YouTube. She didn’t break one million subscribers until April of 2018 and currently has just over two and a half million.
Nikita Dragun had a public friendship with Jeffree Star and Laura Lee until 2017 when the entire clique had a very dramatic falling out. After Jeffree discussed his former friends in his series with Shane Dawson, Nikita was part of a group of YouTubers that made multiple posts throwing shade at Jeffree and saying that they were all better without him. Similar to what happened with Laura Lee, after the dust was blown off their old feud, someone blew the dust off of Nikita’s Twitter and what they found was ugly, to say the least.
Nikita made several tweets in 2012 that made jokes about child abuse and pedophilia. She also tweeted “imagine being black? i could never” and made comments about looking black because of how tan she was. All of these tweets were insensitive and racist. Of course, people rallied to cancel her once and for all after this happened. She only made one post in response to the tweets resurfacing and that was on Instagram. In the same video, she claimed that she was no longer the same person that she was when she made those comments and also alleged that the tweets were fake entirely.
What is so interesting about Nikita Dragun’s controversy is that she seemed to be one of the only people in the entire little group that was in the blast radius of Jeffree’s actions that didn’t face any consequences. She has made no further apologies or statements based on the posts that resurfaced but she has continued to benefit from multiple brand partnerships. She also didn’t see the same drop in subscribers that everyone else involved did. Her channel continues to grow despite her infrequent uploads. She sometimes goes months between videos but SocialBlade shows that she averages almost 170,000,000 views each week.
Tana Mongeau
Tana Mongeau is a musician, model, and YouTuber that started her channel in 2015. She makes lifestyle and vlog videos; her most popular content is her storytime videos where she describes dramatic events that go on in her daily life. She currently has a little bit more than five million subscribers to her channel. She is also active on the social media platform TikTok. After her channel started to gain popularity, she relocated to Los Angeles and has had a series of friendships and relationships with other creators on the platform.
Tana has had some old videos of her making racist comments surface and she is widely accused of being extremely dramatic. She has dated Bella Thorne, Brad Sousa, Jake Paul, and apparently now Logan Paul. She and Jake began their relationship in April of 2019 and announced their engagement in June of that year. In July, the couple posted a wedding video which was later revealed to have been staged. As of January 2020, she changed her social media display name from Tana Paul back to Tana Mongeau. In February of 2020, she referred to Jake Paul’s brother Logan as her boyfriend on TikTok.
Her big scandal took place in 2018. VidCon, the convention for YouTube content creators, didn’t select Tana as one of the featured creators so she announced that she was going to hold her own convention. It was called Tanacon and would take place in the same city and over the same weekend as VidCon. There were more than 80 creators slated to appear and the convention was canceled on June 22nd of 2018, the very same day it began. Tana purposely overbooked the hotel where it was meant to be held, failed to provide food and water, and lied about several aspects of the convention.
Her actions and the events surrounding TanaCon garnered a lot of backlash from her audience and fellow creators, which was what led to her temporary downfall. It slowed the growth of her channel and got her a lot of negative press. She currently doesn’t receive any ad revenue from YouTube because her content doesn’t meet the current guidelines set forth by YouTube. She still has a fairly regular upload schedule. In the past two weeks, she has posted three videos that have a combined view count of about four and a half million.
Trisha Paytas
Trisha Paytas is a very complicated human being, to put it lightly. She is a YouTuber, model, actress, and singer that has more than five million subscribers across her multiple YouTube channels. She got her start on YouTube in 2007 but appeared on multiple television shows prior to that. She officially started on The Greg Behrendt Show in 2006 as a correspondent. She has appeared on at least a half dozen other shows and played roles in multiple music videos. The majority of her videos are hysterical vlogs and mukbangs.
Trisha is one of those YouTubers that people flock to for the drama. She has a self-proclaimed “constant desire for attention” and has definitely gotten it over the years. From trying to break the world record for being the fastest talker, appearing on My Strange Addiction as a tanning addict, and more, it seems there is nothing she won’t do. Trisha calls herself a troll and admits that a lot of the content she produces is just for the clicks, views, and controversy.
It’s almost impossible to single out an instance where Trisha was canceled. She has made an astounding amount of wild claims over the years. In 2015, she made a video complaining about not being able to use racial slurs. Over the years she has been in innumerable feuds with other creators, dated multiple public figures, and claimed to identify as a chicken nugget. In more recent months, she has claimed to be transgender as well as having Dissociative Identity Disorder. Almost everything that she does causes people to riot and argue for her to be canceled. She makes insensitive, offensive, and outright false statements on a regular basis.
Even though Trisha’s entire upload history is full of drama, controversy, and more, she’s remained successful. No matter what people are up in arms about this month, it will die out as quickly as it emerged and Trisha will be on to the next thing. Trisha has suffered backlash for almost everything she’s done but people are so enthralled with her life that they can’t avert their gazes. After each big controversy, she experiences huge dips in subscriber count but her numbers don’t stay down.
She’s currently losing subscribers but her views keep climbing. She uploads every few days without fail and SocialBlade shows that she averages close to two billion views monthly.