Confessions of a YouTube Drama Queen
By Emma Chekroun
Like many people who are social distancing, I have found myself gravitating toward online distractions. YouTube has been my most-used form of anxiety relief since I was in middle school. When I was introduced to YouTube almost ten years ago, Smosh and Charlie the Unicorn were all I knew. At the time, I had no idea that a few short absurdist videos would evolve into a passion for a platform that I watch as often as TV. Over the years I have found new YouTubers and seen the platform grow into a microcosm of celebrity and scandal.
From middle school to college, YouTube has been a source of distraction and relief from the real world. But recently, it has been more difficult to get relief from the platform. In the past several years, YouTube has had its fair share of scandals, ranging from major content creators using racial slurs, like Tana Mongeau and Pewdiepie, to child abuse, with the parents from the channel DaddyOFive sentenced to five years of probation for child neglect in 2017.
For a long time, I did not feel the full weight of YouTube’s dirty conscience—many YouTubers I enjoyed had managed to escape controversy or had shifted out of my realm of consciousness. But I was watching Philip DeFranco and discovered that a YouTuber I had watched on and off in high school was the target of investigation by Chris Hansen, the former host of “To Catch a Predator.” The YouTuber in question was Onision, who became famous for his video “I’m a Banana” when it appeared on the Tosh.O show. Unbeknownst to me, numerous allegations of grooming had been leveled against him. Grooming is building trust and an emotional connection with someone who is underage with the intention of having inappropriate and illegal sexual conduct. These allegations are what made Onision the focus of Chris Hansen’s YouTube channel.
While I often find myself falling down obsessive holes on YouTube, watching hours of drama recap videos and deep dives, when I started watching YouTube, controversy wasn't widely known unless you sought it out. According to HuffPost, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, making it easy to miss a controversy or two depending on how they blow up and who decides to discuss it. I became increasingly obsessed with controversy and drama on YouTube after last year’s “dramageddon” on the platform, when beauty YouTubers Tati Westbrook, James Charles, and Gabriel Zamora publicly aired grievances and dirty laundry about one another.
As my personal life spun out of control after a string of abusive and manipulative friendships, it was comforting to escape into other people’s drama. When the Onision scandal came to my attention, I became obsessed with checking up on new allegations about his grooming behavior and accounts from his alleged victims. I started scouring Reddit for threads on his saga of abuse and insanity. In a twisted way, it felt like I was doing important work, educating myself on what was happening, intoxicated by the twisted details, similar to how it feels after watching a Criminal Minds marathon. I would begin to experience withdrawal and seek out other channels reporting on what was happening, looking for any shred of information I had missed, until that fizzled out and receded to the back of my mind.
All of those thoughts and feelings remained dormant until I watched Trisha Paytas’ video “Meet My Alters.” For anyone out there lucky enough to not be familiar with Trisha Paytas or her YouTube channel blndsundoll4mj, Trisha has had a varied career on YouTube over the past 13 years, producing content that ranges from music videos, to sex toy reviews, to videos of her crying on her bathroom floor. For a long time, she was known for her trolling videos, in which she would make shocking claims like “dogs don’t have brains.” Five months ago, Trisha Paytas was thrust into the limelight again, when she made a YouTube video coming out as transgender, which many felt was meant to mock the transgender community. Despite the backlash, Trisha’s channel has almost five million subscribers.
Having been introduced to Trisha Paytas through Shane Dawson, another high school YouTube favorite of mine, I felt inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. At the time I believed it wasn’t fair to assume someone who presented themselves one way couldn’t feel in their heart another way. The controversy slowly piddled out, and like many others, I wasn’t really sure what had happened. Now, less than a year after this massive controversy, Trisha Paytas made another video, this time claiming she had dissociative identity disorder, and it was met with a negative response. Not willing to be fooled again, I felt frustrated; here was someone who had done something like this before and yet she had millions of followers.
All of a sudden, the hypocrisy and injustice of YouTube came crashing down and there wasn’t a single YouTuber I could watch or support. It’s made me wonder if YouTube has become a breeding ground for narcissism and abuse—not unlike the entertainment industry. Now I find myself at a crossroads, trying to understand how to feel about a platform I loved that now seems so toxic. I wonder if this has always been harmless entertainment. Is my role in engaging with drama, even if it’s not my own, toxic? As I purge my life of toxicity and examine things with the extra time lent by the COVID-19 situation, I wonder if YouTube will become another toxic habit I leave behind.