You probably already know of Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie. If you don’t… well, PewDiePie exists, he shrieks a lot while playing video games on YouTube and has a long history of doing a bunch of offensive things. It appears that he did enough offensive things that Roblox has decided that his name alone is an offensive term, as players creating objects encouraging people to subscribe to his channel or saying his name in chat has been flagged as offensive.
No precise announcement has been forthcoming for why, but it’s being speculated that the title has surreptitiously banned mentions of Kjellberg’s handle for the aforementioned long list of offensive behaviors. Kjellberg himself, when faced with this restriction in a stream of the game, played the situation off as a joke and demanded an apology. Obviously the player himself has not been banned (although his stream was made on a temporary account which has since been deleted), but it’s new territory to ban someone’s name from the game, an experience previously only faced by BreaktheTOS McBuygold (of the New Hampshire McBuygolds).
“We wanted to provide some context on the situation with PewDiePie. Roblox is committed to providing a safe and civil platform for our players, including blocking memes that represent or are synonymous for behavior that falls outside of our community standards. In December, ‘pewdie’ became one of these negative memes on Roblox. As such, we began blocking the creation of new usernames that incorporated the term ‘pewdie.’ The legacy account that PewDiePie used in his livestream was incorrectly banned as part of the administration of this policy. His legacy account is being reinstated. As with every user, we have a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate behavior on Roblox that violates our terms of use or community guidelines, including discriminatory speech or actions based on race or ethnic origin, national origin, religion or religious affiliation, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation. If a violation occurs, that user account will be banned.”
