“Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” he said. But the people watching the video stream recognized it as something entirely different: a meme. For his online followers, it was a kind of satirical Easter egg. The goal, if there was one, may have been to pull a popular internet figure into a fractious blame game and inflame political tensions everywhere. (In a tweet early Friday morning, PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, said, “I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.”)

Source: New York Times March 15, 2019 15:29 UTC