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It isn’t unusual for YouTube’s top brass to be embroiled in some sort of controversy, as that has come to define the platform’s standing in popular culture. Between filming live suicide, convincing someone that their longtime best friend is dead, and paying people to hold signs saying “Death to All Jews”, gaffes by popular YouTubers aren’t exactly running in short supply. The latest round of them issued against Jenna Marbles though, couldn’t have been a further departure from the rest.
At several occasions, Marbles displayed a great deal of responsibility with the way she wielded her enormous platform. She was one of the earliest popular creators to embrace the presence of non-binary people in her audience — even before the political weathercocks swung in her favor — and there’s never been a more pronounced arc of redemption than the one she went through. She ditched YouTube’s old conventions to accommodate the political sensibilities of a modern audience and as a result, has shown great accountability regarding the subpar themes of her old content–that’s what’s being currently leveraged against her, and it’s why she’s preliminarily decided to depart the platform for good.
Oftentimes when public figures are exposed to the horrid of their prior lives, they reframe it in the context of their erstwhile ignorance. Where Marbles deviates from the norm, is she doesn’t try to make up any excuses about it–she felt compelled to go through a deep moment of self-introspection after her past has come back to haunt her, and it’s an earnest display of what a responsible individual would do with their huge platform if they feared the adverse consequences of wielding it to great harm.
But Marbles for sure didn’t have to go as far as removing herself from YouTube–while it might seem sensible to kowtow to the demands of an angry mob, what an indiscriminate application of cancel culture often disregards, is that…
