So what the fuck is happening?
On January 10th, news and gossip channel Pop Blast appeared out of nowhere with 677k subscribers, with a bizarre and easily refutable vid accusing one Shane Dawson of pedophilia. Based on... clearly twisted evidence, as well as bizarre claims such as his past girlfriend and current boyfriend having "baby faces".
Alright, more #metoo witchhunting internet drama bullshit, great. Aside from the channel appearing out of nowhere nothing seems out of the ordinary.
But then some shit fucking happened.
The channel deleted the accusation video and uploaded an apology video... an apology video consisting of a screenshot of a Paypal receipt showing a large transaction from one "Jeffrey Oscar Levin" and a coded message claiming "they" were "distracting you". The audio is styled like a numbers station- a creepy little girl's voice text-to-speech reading off numbers, which turn out to be ASCII code containing the message.
Two similar videos soon followed, one implying they'd been paid money for something they'd regretted, and another seemingly naming "they" as "Hollywood". The latter also showed a heavily redacted email, with the few visible sentences implying it was instructions for the accusation video.
Oh, and apparently there was something about the fucking Rothschilds in there, so you can add the Ill-jew-minati to all this.
Soon after this the channel began spamming stolen content, posting new videos every few minutes. The videos are about 10 minutes each, laden with ads and seem to be heavy clickbait, including what seems to be some poor one woman's video suicide note. (though this one was deleted?) There was also a short livestream at some point, though I can't find what it contained. This thread follows most of it.
This went on until the channel was terminated by Youtube- definitely terminated, not deleted by the user.
Okay, so what the fuck is happening?
Clearly, this was some desperate grab for attention, but what for?
Inclusion of Logan Paul's manager's name (because that's apparently who that is) led some to suggest this was a ploy to draw attention off logpaul by pointing the finger at another Youtuber- that is, the manager paid some rando with a good amount of subs to start shit, and when it fell through they regretted it and pulled out. This is... pretty quickly questionable, as there's plenty of room for drama from multiple fronts on the wide plains of the interwebs. One other accused Youtuber would be a drop in an ocean of piss. Unless the account had planned to accuse additional Youtubers on a massive scale there'd really likely be no effect on logpaul's situation or the scrutiny he's under.
On the other hand, if the name on the receipt was faked, this could either be an attempt to further attack logpaul by framing him (unlikely to have much of an effect), a quick attempt to divert blame for a failed attack on Shane, or an attempt to whore attention from multiple vectors at once.
That last one works quite well into the spooky number stations code shtick. Generic creepy or "ARG"-like content tends to grab eyeballs, something like a horror fan version of clickbait. The implications of "they" and a greater conspiracy would draw even more attention while being so fucking vague and generic the OP would have to put almost no work into creating their "story". After that, the flood of ad-riddled stolen clickbait videos might have been an attempt to use the massive influx of views to make some quick ad money.
I can't tell from that if it was all planned out this way (implicate multiple big yt-ers as bait for ad views) or if it was all a desperate reaction to the original accusation's failure, but otherwise is seems coherent.
... Problem with that is, the channel was already making plenty of money as it was, and it didn't seem like it was going to be stopping any time soon. The amount shown in the receipt was only about as much as Pop Blast made in a day. There was no need for a publicity stunt on this level. So what was this?
Personally, what the actions of the Pop Blast channel puts me in mind of are certain other channels I've seen covered before... from the spooky creepy M5 and box face guy to the comedic and trollish Mumkey's bizarre adventure with reactor. That is, channels parodying the dregs and drama of Youtube and highlighting the unoriginality of many huge channels.
The channel hit multiple tropes of shit youtube posting (or internet drama in general)- bullshit accusations or "callouts", spooky "ARG" material with generic codes and stories, stolen content and clickbait ad shit. The suicide note video even seems like a nod to the Logan Paul suicide forest shitstorm, a huge current event which Pop Blast placed at the center or their... thing with the "apology" video. The use of a receipt as the main evidence, when "receipt" is used as internet slang for proof in callout posts also seems particularly on-the-nose.
That said, something about the channel's trajectory seems particularly... unhinged. Suggestions that the owner was experiencing a mental breakdown of some sort seem almost plausible. Not to armchair psychologise, but I can easily imagine something like... the channel owner gets caught in a delusion that Shaye really is a pedophile, and sees evidence that isn't really there which he tries to cover in his video... and the response and disapproval to his accusation sends him into a downward spiral.
It's not like this is the first time we've seen bizarre mentions of Hollywood in a seemingly delusional context. (Hey, maybe Pop Blast found the Hollywood astral projection clinic...)
Hearing of the original content of the channel (it was... a Jacob Sartorius fan channel?) I also wonder if the original owner would even have been capable of pulling off such a stunt. From the scraps I've heard or found it was mostly unintelligent, really low-quality clickbait (like the videos posted in PB's last hours, except apparently it was at least original content). Shit like, to quote one commentor, "video of the woman with the record for the highest note Georgia brown hitting a random high note and calling it the highest note ever hit by a human".
Even as dumbass clickbait goes, that's not very... good.
Depending on how deliberately played out this whole thing was, I also wonder if the last span of videos was a ploy to get the channel taken down instead of deleting it themselves, which would have implied some agency and deliberate action on the part of the uploader and possibly cued in the "audience" to it all being a sham. Something like a Youtube suicide-by-cop.
IT KEEPS FUCKING HAPPENING
Oh, but there's fucking more of this shit, because of fucking course there is. A possibly fake twitter account was found, followed by multiple most definitely fake twitter accounts. To be honest I have no idea what the fuck shit went down there; I mostly just watched youtuber Pop Smack (no relation) livestream about it. Apparently the account "PopBlast_" came out as a jape but "RealPopBlast" is still going.
There's another account named "Pop Pro Blast", with a single upload that seems in line with what Pop Blast used to post-
Another (new) channel tied to RealPopBlast posted a short, edge-tastic generic coded ARG video that... isn't actually that bad. It has such a high density of edge and visual effects that it's almost refreshing to watch. Anyway, it seems to follow in the footsteps of the original Pop Blast, and accuses multiple Youtubers (including Jake and Logan Paul, Shane Dawson and... Marina Joyce?) of... uh, something. Well, if you wanted an ARG out of this thing it might be worth following.
On the other hand, their Twitter has this to say:
I thought Shane Dawson taught you guys how to decode and analyze information properly. The answers lie within the videos. You say we haven't given proof, but we have. Look harder.
Which sounds more like an attempt to appeal to Shane Dawson's fanbase than an accusation.
Backtracking a bit, some have noticed that the first letter of the video titles uploaded by Pop Blast before the channel was deleted spelled out the nearly intelligible "rat pig him"... or "ratt pig himtg". Does it mean anything? Who knows.