Posted inNews

Minecraft streamer Karl Jacobs apologizes for past affiliations with controversial gamer Paul ‘Ice Poseidon’ Denino

Click here to watch Denino’s apartment get raided by the FBI.

by ITP Live

More of this topic

Popular Minecraft streamer Karl Jacobs apologizes for past affiliations with controversial gamer Paul ‘Ice Poseidon’ Denino

Popular Minecraft streamer Karl Jacobs is under fire for his past affiliations with controversial streamer Paul ‘Ice Poseidon’ Denino.

In an effort to appease his fans, Jacobs has uploaded an apology video after a clip of him and Denino doing a stream together resurfaced on Twitter. He was also called out for another resurfaced clip of him spamming another creator’s Twitch stream with ‘CX’ – a catchphrase used by Denino’s followers. Jacobs later explained that ‘CX’ was a general gaming term used to describe gaming characters who have a ‘big nose’.

Denino – who began his Twitch career in 2015 – is regularly accused of cultivating a toxic fanbase. Referring to themselves as the ‘purple army’, Denino’s fans are known to harass other streamers by spamming their streams with their ‘CX’ catchphrase. Although Denino doesn’t have full control over his fans, he has been heavily criticized for promoting their behavior.

Moreover, he has garnered huge criticism in the past for his streams that involve harassing passerbyers in Los Angeles using text-to-speech technology: during these live streams, Denino’s ‘purple army’ would send offensive and racist slurs to harass the stream’s unwilling participants.

Denino’s fanbase is also known for harassing him during his live streams – which has resulted in severe legal trouble for the gamer. Swatting – or calling the police – has been a fan favorite amongst his army, with the gamer being unnecessarily swatted in many of his live streams. The swatting pranks went too far – however – after Denino’s atomic bomb prank on an American Airlines flight led to Twitch banning him from the platform. Denino streamed on YouTube for a short period after the incident, but eventually started his own streaming platform ‘CX Network’. The platform was shut down in March 2019 – however – after the FBI raided his apartment.

After his platform was forcibly shut down, Denino experienced short-lived success on Microsoft’s streaming platform Mixer – before it was also closed down. Denino – who was forced to return to YouTube – pleaded to Twitch to reverse his ban on the platform.

In an interview with Dot Esports, Denino revealed that YouTube was not the optimal platform for him to stream his gaming content.

“Discoverability is bad, and you have to constantly grind to get in the algorithm and get recommended and it’s just very difficult to do that as a streamer,” Ice said. “If YouTube wants to just do anything, like if they could just add a better chat room where, like everyone has badges and more intrinsic sort of options to customize who they are in the chat. That would be a great first start to building a healthy community, because right now YouTube chat is just spam”.

Denino also shared that despite advances in removing the toxicity from his online community – he is still having trouble collaborating with other gamers.

“I mean I’d love to collab with literally any other streamer without some weird stipulations. And then also Twitch is obviously a better streaming platform than YouTube, so I’d like to go on there and be a part of it. It’s unfortunate though, the main thing is not being able to collaborate with other people. It’s very difficult, it’s very annoying, and it’s very depressing to be honest with you”.

Jacobs is a perfect example of Denino’s hardships in finding other gamers to collaborate with. Despite Denino trying to clean up his public image, Jacobs still had to apologize to his fans for his past associations with the controversial streamer.

“There’s threads going out there that I’ve associated with a streamer, a prominent streamer, that is currently known for a lot of bad stuff, like racism, any phobia you could think of. I just want to make it clear, a million percent, I don’t condone anything I’ve done. I hope that’s clear; that’s just not who I am as a person. That’s just never who I wanted to be. I just never want anyone to associate that kind of garbage with me because it’s not true. I’m sorry that I made anyone uncomfortable because I understand that. I am sorry that I’ve upset people. I know I have; I appreciate you guys a lot for hearing it out, at least”.

Jacob’s apology was criticized – however – after he failed to address many of the allegations made against him.

Jacobs later posted a a formal apology letter on Twitlonger – stating that he failed to express himself properly in his initial video apology:

“After my stream the other day I felt like I wasn’t able to express how I felt correctly and that it wasn’t the best format for me to respond in, so I wanted to make a formal apology here where I can more explicitly express myself in an organized format, that way I can make sure that I say things the right way. Since then I have taken the time to educate myself and do my best to hear people’s concerns”.

In response to the drama surrounding Jacobs, Denino tweeted in defense of the fellow gamer – who he said was falling prey to toxic fans who were mobilizing a ‘witch hunt’ against him:

With many Twitch users trying to ‘cancel’ Jacobs, top streamers such as Trainwreckstv, Dream and Hafu have also jumped to Jacobs defense – with them voicing their support and arguing that cancel culture was not the appropriate methodology to hold someone accountable for their actions.