PewDiePie hits back at accusations that he promoted a “scam” to fans
PewDiePie, YouTube / NimsesYouTube king Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg is no stranger to scandal, following the controversial ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’ meme amid his now-defunct battle with T-Series: but this time, the Swede is coming under fire for a completely different reason.
Kjellberg addressed concerns over a mobile app that he’d advertised in an episode of ‘Pew News’ on June 7, which introduces a markedly revolutionary concept of turning a user’s time spent in the app into cryptocurrency.
The application, named ‘Nimses,’ is an “insane concept“ to PewDiePie – but critics are finding the program a bit skeevy, and voiced their concerns on the Swede’s subreddit.
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PewDiePie came across these concerns during an episode of ‘LWIAY’ on June 9, where he fought back against claims that Nimses records user data outside of the app.
“This is just demonstrably false,” Kjellberg argued. “Apps can’t do that, if you uninstall it. It’s already spreading misinformation, just in the title. Literally every single social media tracks what Nimses does. It’s a social media app.”
[Timestamp: 8:08 for mobile users]
The YouTube king went on to berate his overly protective fans, who he felt were digging up “false information” in an attempt to clear up the situation – which ultimately made it seem like he was advertising a malicious program.
“Everyone seems so protective of me,” PewDiePie continued. “My fans are like, ‘Oh, we need to protect him from the media stuff,’ but then you’re spreading misinformation to make it look like I’m promoting a scam. Obviously, that makes it look way worse.”
Nimses’ website claims that the app is a “worldwide system which records and saves the time of a human being’s life.”However, PewDiePie’s fanbase aren’t the only netizens skeptical of the program: tech news site ‘Kaspersky’ claims that the Ukrainian-developed app “isn’t safe so far,” noting that to earn more money in the program, users must give away their privacy piece by piece, uploading a profile picture and personal information to become “visible” to other users.
Kaspersky likewise claims that location tracking services must be enabled for Nimses to work – meaning that users must be willing to have their location tracked if they want to take part in the social media experiment.
While the app has since fixed a number of the issues raised in Kaspersky’s article, there is still an unsettling aura of unease around Nimses – a scandal that follows similar accusations surrounding PewDiePie’s involvement with livestreaming platform DLive in April.