YouTube has suspended monetization on all three of Shane Dawson's channels for an indefinite period of time, Buzzfeed News confirms. This includes his main channel "Shane," which has 22.5 million subscribers and 35 million monthly views, "Shane Dawson TV," and a newly-created beauty channel called "Shane Glossin'."
On Friday, Dawson posted a video titled "Taking Accountability" where he apologized for a slew of past offenses, which included donning blackface, saying the n-word, and playing up stereotypical depictions of Asian, Black, and Latino people in sketches. He also acknowledges that his prior use of the n-word alone is "something that I should have probably lost my career for at the time."
Dawson also came under fire when a clip of himself feigning masturbation to a poster of a then-11-year-old Willow Smith surfaced online. This unearthed footage rightfully angered the Smith family, drawing responses from Willow’s mother Jada Pinkett and brother Jaden on Twitter.
Dawson, who is 12 years older than Willow, didn’t directly name her in his apology video, but he did address past comments he has made joking about pedophilia. "I swear on my life; I am not somebody who would ever talk about a child that in any way was inappropriate," he said. "That is disgusting. That is gross. It is not something I would ever do. It is something I did for shock value or because I thought it was funny."
YouTube states that a corporate response was needed after reviewing Dawson's older videos. The company defended its right to retroactively suspend an account if it was in violation of community guidelines. YouTube exercised the same practice against Logan Paul after a 2018 video where he's walking through Japan's Aokigahara Forest, which has been referred to as "suicide forest," and finding the body of a man who appeared to have recently hanged himself.
