Chris Crocker Deletes YouTube Channel

YouTube sensation Chris Crocker recently deleted his YouTube account over abusive commenters. That’s right: it has been eight years since he first uploaded his famous “Leave Britney Alone” video and he has only now learned something that professional bloggers have known for decades: never read the comments.

Why I deleted my YouTube
Posted by Chris Crocker on Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Crocker regularly posted videos on a range of topics: from comments about his family life, anti-femme misogyny in gay culture and even quick humorous bits lasting less than a minute long. But now all those videos have vanished. In a Facebook video shared early Tuesday morning (above), he explained:

“I started to realize that I’m not that 19-year-old anymore and things that I have been through — depression, anxiety, and different mental health issues that I have tried to overcome — that came into play in my mid-20s, and having this reputation of being the “Leave Britney Alone” guy for so many years, and all these things that people thought about me; y’know, I realized that the environment was something I couldn’t handle any more.”

He further explained his reasoning in a brief Facebook post which read in part:

The website got so toxic with comments telling me to kill myself if I just uploaded a regular ‘hi, how are you guys?’ video; that it just wasn’t worth it. My mental health and focusing on positivity is the most important- and people that appreciate me, instead of trying to see the worst of me.

He’s right of course — YouTube is a cesspool of abusive comments. The site allows content creators to preemptively ban comments that contain certain keywords, but trolls tend to be bad spellers and can easily get around the filters by misspelling words like “faggit” and “dumm bich.”

Crocker says he chose not to disable the comments on his videos because he hadn’t seen the option when uploading videos from his phone. He also felt “swept under the rug” by YouTube’s promotional campaigns which omitted any acknowledgement of his work despite his contributions to the site’s fame. He leaves the site feeling abused and generally unappreciated.

But seeing as he has 1,898,965 Facebook fans and just released a new musical single, it’s unlikely that Crocker will disappear from the digital landscape, no matter if you consider him a treasure (which he is) or just a “dumm bich.”

“Dear Fat People” vlogger Nicole Arbour fails, spectacularly, to defend herself and her video on “The View”

Canadian comedian Nicole Arbour of “Dear Fat People” went on “The View” today to defend her pro-fat-shaming video, and the co-hosts were — to put it mildly — none too impressed with her defenses.

After playing a clip of “Dear Fat People,” Whoopi Goldberg asked Arbour whether she even understands why people found her video offensive.

“What I find most offensive about that video is my hair. Frankly, if I knew it would go viral,” she was saying when Goldberg cut her off. “You’re here, this is your shot,” she said, “so did you expect to offend people?”

Arbour replied that she did, because that’s her shtick. She added that she only made the video because “fat people” in her audience felt left out of her vlogging. “That topic was actually voted in by fans,” she said, “some of whom are fat.”

Joy Behar noted that as a comic, it’s one thing to make fun of yourself and your own failings, another to upbraid others for theirs. “I’m a comic,” she said, “so if I’m going to make a joke about a fat person, I’m going to call myself ‘fat’ first. That’s your problem — you’re not fat.”

Arbour repeatedly claimed that her video was satire, but co-panelist Michelle Collins couldn’t see it. When asked “Where is the satire?” Arbour wasn’t able to formulate a coherent answer. That shouldn’t be too surprising, as satire requires an object to be satirized, and Arbour’s comedy — at least in this case — lacked one.

Watch the entire segment via “The View” below.