David Dobrik is a YouTuber, podcaster, and co-founder of a disposable photos app. He found early success from making entertaining Vine’s and then started making vlogs that were posted online in 2015. His charm and cheeky personality shot him to superstardom very quickly. Some may say that recently David hit the peak of his career after hitting 18 million subscribers and purchasing a 10 million dollar house. David was arguably one of the most successful and entertaining YouTubers on the platform…until about two weeks ago.
David’s whole basis of his vlogs is to record his friends, AKA the “Vlog Squad”, pulling pranks, doing crazy dares, and causing havoc around Los Angeles. His viewers never got bored of the content since we were constantly seeing something new that caught our attention. But, recently, many of David’s friends and colleagues have come forward with allegations of sexual assault and bullying against him. The majority of these instances were planned bits to be put in the vlogs as “entertainment”, but were definitely taken too far. For example, a bit that was going to be used in a video was David encouraging his blindfolded friend to kiss another man under the pretense that it was going to be a female model. This was only one situation of many. David refused to address the issues for a while and then proceeded to post a pretty weak apology video after losing millions of followers and many brand deals.
I am not going to lie, I was a huge fan of David’s vlogs. I would watch them religiously every time he posted. But, once he began to be exposed, I understood that the videos I once thought were funny was actually very inappropriate. I always wondered why David was never the butt of any of the jokes. The videos always followed his friends doing the insane stuff while he just hung around behind the camera and made money off of them. Now looking at the situation, he makes it seem like he never wanted to be in trouble and that maybe he knew he was doing something wrong. Hearing everyone’s stories of their experiences with these scandals opened my eyes to see that there is a lot of deep stuff that viewers do not realize that goes on behind the scenes. Cancel culture is such a huge thing these days so I thought it would blow over because I did not know the severity of the situation. But, I am glad that I understand how wrong it was for them to do such acts. I regret giving them more attention and praise as a fan. I am sure so many other people were just like me and did not realize we were the ones encouraging them to post more with our support.
I kept up with the news and watched his apology videos. The first one was posted on his podcast channel which has the least amount of subscribers. I was annoyed that he would not be bold enough to be able to apologize on his platforms with the most subscribers/followers. It was a cheap apology and did not feel sincere in the slightest. He ended up making another apology which was a little bit better and longer, but it does not in any way make up for the hysteria he caused some people. David said he would be taking a long break from posting content. I am very curious to see how he will come back from this and how the media will react.
