Saturday 25 July 2015

Exeposé Features - 'YouTubers: Taking Advantage of "Celebrity"?'

Originally published on Exeposé Online, 26 April 2014. Click the image to read the full article.

Recently the YouTube community has been rocked by allegations of an under age sex scandal, Christy Ku looks at the development of events and how this has impacted the online YouTube community. 

Over the past month, allegations of sexual abuse and emotional manipulation against certain members of the YouTube community have emerged, specifically against video bloggers (vloggers) and musicians Tom Milson and Alex Day.  These accusations are not currently a legal matter; however they have been taken seriously by their label DFTBA Records and by fellow YouTubers.
Initially, a girl named Olga Breslavets spoke out about her six month relationship with Tom Milson, which was emotionally abusive, beginning when she was fifteen and he was twenty one.  Seemingly encouraged, several others have also stepped out with their allegations against Alex Day, detailing emotional and sexual manipulation, as well as adultery. Whilst Milson has remained silent on the matter, Day has produced two statements on his Tumblr account. At first, he writes that “At no point in my life have I ever had a sexual relationship with someone under the age of consent [or] ever undertaken any romantic activity, sexual or otherwise, without being sure the other person wanted it.” However, his later post appeared to contradict his previous statement; “the result of that belief is that ‘only no means no’, is that I spend a long part of my life doing shitty things to good people and barely ever realising or acknowledging that I was doing the shitty things”. He has since asked DFTBA Records to take down his merchandise.

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