Shane Dawson has officially made a comeback to YouTube over a year after being cancelled online, teasing a three-part documentary series focusing on the paranormal.
In summer 2020, popular YouTuber Shane Dawson was met with an onslaught of backlash and criticism after clips from his older videos and podcasts surfaced online.
Much of this content was criticized for being racist in nature and inappropriate. Even the likes of Jada Pinkett Smith called out Dawson for a comment he’d made about her daughter, Willow Smith, sparking further outrage against him.
The fallout that followed was nothing to sneeze at. Dawson lost over 400,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, and his collaborative ‘Conspiracy’ makeup line with beauty guru Jeffree Star was removed by Morphe in wake of the controversy.
Nearly a year and a half has passed since Dawson published an apology video discussing the aforementioned scandals, and after quite a while of teasing a potential comeback on social media, he uploaded a forty-minute long video on October 7, 2021.
In the video, Dawson addressed the drama from last year, claiming he felt “horrified” by the ordeal.
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Shane Dawson responds to past controversies in new YouTube video
“I definitely feel ashamed and embarrassed and horrified over a lot of the old clips and stuff that started coming out when I got canceled and all of that, awful,” he said. “Then it snowballed. It’s weird, if I talk about it, how I really feel, people are gonna say, ‘Oh, you’re trying to get sympathy,’ or whatever. So, I like, don’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t want to be looked at as somebody who gave up and left and ran away from the internet because they were afraid of whatever,” he said later on in the video. “I left because I felt like I should, and I left because I needed time.”
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Dawson’s latest project is a three-part documentary series detailing hauntings and other such paranormal activity, with his newest YouTube upload being the first of these.
Thus far, responses to Shane’s comeback are decidedly mixed — but it looks like Dawson is focusing on creating content in spite of public opinion.