PewDiePie Was Briefly Banned from Twitter for Saying He Was Joining ISIS

The world's most popular YouTuber, Felix Kjellberg, AKA PewDiePie, AKA Pewds, got his Twitter account suspended for all of five minutes after he said he had joined ISIS. The 26-year-old Swedish gamer, who has 47,617,653 subscribers on YouTube at the time of writing, tweeted that "Me and @Jack_Septic_Eye [an Irish YouTuber who also plays a lot of games on camera] have joined isis. Which is why we both got unverified." Mr Septic-Eye replied that he claimed he had joined the Nazi party, not ISIS.

According to Twitter rules, accounts giving props to "organisations and individuals associated with promoting hate" are quick to receive the ban hammer, even if those accounts belong to the wildly popular creator of the term "brofist". Though it's probably clear to Pewds' 4.9 million followers that he wasn't about to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his caliphate, it's also nice to see that Twitter treats everyone the same. It doesn't matter if you're a Brighton-based Swedish professional video game player who is literally a millionaire from shouting at a screen, or just your average street level schmuck – if you tweet that you're going to join the Islamic State, Twitter will take you down to Chinatown, baby!

Though Pewds' account was reinstated, the collateral damage was his verified tick, which he has now shirked. In a video explaining the whole commotion, he insists that verified accounts are not cool any more, and that "Globified" is the way forward, signalled by a globe emoji next to his name.

Poor old Pewdie also had to make a video recently telling people to stop coming to his house because it's really weird, which is fair enough, because if a bunch of brofist creeps starting turning up at my door, screaming and spitting half-chewed Jaffa Cake at me, I'd be pretty pissed off too.

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