It comes as no surprise when a big company and/or digital influencer get their name in the news for something terrible. There are two old sayings for those occasions: “You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain” and “Don’t ever meet your idol in person, as you’ll inevitably be disappointed”. In this article, we will go through the events that have shaken a 37 year old to the point of going from someone everyone looks up to, to a much less dignified version of themselves and even allegedly banning “the M-Word”.
Gamer Nexus case
A few days ago, Youtube channel “Gamer Nexus”, specialized in reviewing and reporting news on hardware and technology in general, made a video bringing up the discussion on another youtube channel, “Linus Tech Tips”, talking about their lack of accuracy and ethics associated with rushing the making of videos, which inevitably leads to errors and overlooking obvious methodological problems in their tests. You may watch it yourself below:
This prompted a response from Linus(Open in a new tab to better see it, as the image is quite big. Couldn’t find the original forum post):
And as anyone with enough patience to read the wall of text can see, Linus decided to shift the blame, stating things like “We didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity”(as if that was much different). Gamer nexus then further responded, and that seems to be the last of it:
LTT, as a company, then did PR damage control and posted a video called “What do we do now?” explaining that the company won’t post any videos for the following week, in order to internally address things and try to work on the problem. The video, as it stands, is nothing more than a soulless company response, to try and fix what Linus made worse with his post. No one should take words as being valuable without seeing actual actions and change. Adding insult to injury, the video had a paywall initially(only available in floatplane for a shortwhile), and until the moment of writing, has MERCH promotions in the description.
And this brings us the next, much worse, topic.
The Madison case
At the same time as what was discussed above happened Madison, a former employee from LTT, made a post on Twitter(no elon, I won’t call it X), discussing why they left the company:
And here we see that the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than anyone expected. Allegedly, she was touched inappropriately, threatened of being fired when complained, had her contributions being looked down upon and was put under unrealistic expectations(Believe me, as an editor myself, I know that just the plan, film and edit part of her job can take days). Opening the tweet will display the rest of her 24 or so posts about the topic, detailing her experience.
When The Verge reached to Linus about the case, he responded with the following:
I was in a state of shock reading through these allegations, plain and simple. They aren’t consistent with my recollections. They aren’t consistent with our internal processes. They aren’t consistent with our company values.
We pride ourselves on maintaining a safe and inclusive environment. In addition to our existing report systems (both anonymous and otherwise) we’ve proactively reached out internally today to encourage members of our team to report any workplace bullying or harassment they might be experiencing so we can take quick and decisive action.
Our HR team will be conducting a more thorough assessment of the allegations, and when we are ready, we will release a more complete statement. For now I would ask that we allow our team the time they need be as thorough as possible.
The Verge also stated that Linus Media Group is hiring an outside investigator to look into all the allegations and conduct investigations on the matter, and will “commit to publish the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this”.
Update(18/08/2023): Since the writing of this post, many users have been reporting the censoring of comments involving Madison. And despite not being able to personally confirm it, I couldn’t find a single one containing “Madison” in the apology video. This alongside the many accusations on reddit and other platforms indicate that the company may, indeed, be censoring those.
Update(26/08/2023): LTT has released a new video addressing some of the stuff that happened and their positions/actions taken
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