A YouTuber with over 3 million followers responded to backlash after eating live squids and octopuses on her channel, which critics call 'cruel'

• YouTuber Ssoyoung, who boasts 3.4 million followers, has risen to viral fame in the mukbang and ASMR communities for her videos consuming vast quantities of seafood.
• While she's experienced a meteoric rise on the platform since joining in December of 2018, she's begun to receive backlash from fellow creators for consuming live seafood on her channel.
• YouTubers Ethan Klein and Tyler Rugge recently posted videos calling her content "cruel" — and Rugge demanded that YouTube ban her channel entirely.
• Representatives for Ssoyoung's said that the channel aims to provide a new cultural perspective and the YouTube star does not condone animal abuse.
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Ssoyoung, a popular mukbang YouTuber based in South Korea, has amassed 3.4 million followers in just 16 months. The 30-year-old rose to viral fame thanks to her videos in which she consumes seafood, desserts, and Hot Cheetos, among other meals. The videos — featuring chewing, slurping, and whispering — titillate not only YouTube's extreme eating community, but also those interested in autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) content.

While devouring massive quantities of seafood is common in the mukbang space, much of Ssoyoung's content has an added component: she often consumes live seafood in her videos.

In her most popular video, titled "Dancing Live Squid," Ssoyoung prepares and consumes live squid. After cutting off several squids' mantles, she coats them in soy sauce and reacts to the writhing cephalopods.

The video has been viewed over 24 million times.

The practice of eating live seafood, while controversial, is not uncommon. In 2015, Vice reported that there are several restaurants in Seoul, South Korea dedicated to preparing live octopus.

But Ssoyoung's unconventional methods of preparation — like leaving the octopus whole and allowing the tentacles to wrap around her mouth, arguably, designed for shock factor and visual drama — have raised eyebrows.

While she's been posting videos to the platform for over a year, racking up a total of 396 million views on her mukbang and ASMR content, Ssoyoung has recently begun to receive backlash and accusations of animal cruelty.

YouTuber and podcaster Ethan Klein, who runs the h3h3Productions channel with his wife Hila, uploaded a video titled "ASMR Has Gone Way Too Far," in which he condemned Ssoyoung's content and criticized selected clips from her videos for his 6.6 million subscribers.

Klein began the 14-minute video by featuring footage from the mukbanger's most popular video, calling out her propensity for zooming in on the writhing animals and "highlighting the brutality of the act of decapitating a living squid."

"She clearly loves torturing animals," he said.

"Is cruelty a central theme of her content? This video, I believe, proves yes," Klein added before playing a clip of the Ssoyoung coating a live octopus in sauce and placing it on a grill.

Klein went on to address potential accusations he might face of bullying and xenophobia, but he doubled down on his criticism, citing a video in which Ssoyoung skips around a forest before "discovering" a live octopus — and eating it on camera.

In just two days, the video has been viewed over 1.4 million times and racked up thousands of comments.

"I'm really glad creators are bringing awareness to this," one commenter wrote on Klein's video. "This has been a problem for a long time."

"I honestly don't understand why she gets so much support," another said. "One of the most popular mukbangers on the platform. Says a lot about humanity and how hypocritical people are."

"The most disturbing aspect is not even necessarily the physical way she goes about killing the squids/octopuses, it's the spectacle she makes of it," another wrote.

YouTuber Tyler Rugge, whose animal-focused content features his exotic pets, posted a video titled "Mukbang Youtuber who Hurts & Kills Animals on Camera," in which he called for Ssoyoung's removal from the platform.

"She tortures and kills animals before she eats them. On camera," Rugge said to his 332,000 subscribers. "Not sure how YouTube let this one slide."

He went all to call the videos "cruel" and voiced his support for removing her content from YouTube.

Several hours later, Rugge posted a second video addressing what he described as "the cultural aspect" of the controversy, in which he insisted that his critique was not xenophobic but rather a concern for animal welfare.

Animal abuse is banned on YouTube — and the platform says Ssoyoung's content does not violate its policies.

Animal abuse is explicitly banned on YouTube under its Violent or Graphic content policy.

The platform instructs against posting content "where there is infliction of unnecessary suffering or harm deliberately causing an animal distress." YouTube specifically cites "non-educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic content that shows unnecessary suffering" as subject to the policy. Historically, however, noted applications of the policy have been in incidents involving mammals, or even robots simulating mammals.

"Our Trust & Safety team is located around the globe and we draw upon this regional expertise when drafting our policies," a YouTube spokesperson told Insider in a statement. "We have strict policies regarding animal abuse, and have determined the videos highlighted do not violate them."

Representatives for Ssoyoung say that the channel's purpose is to provide viewers with a new cultural perspective and that the YouTube star does not condone animal abuse.

"Ssoyoung channel's primary goal and intention is to introduce various kinds of food and to deliver joy to our beloved viewers across the world. As Ssoyoung is a Korean YouTuber, we put our basis on Korean food culture," a representative for the channel said in a statement to Insider. "With that baseline, we occasionally feature dishes that non-Korean viewers may find exotic, with a hope to provide new experience and joy."

The representative added that while Ssoyoung acknowledges that her efforts to present delicacies including live seafood "may have caused some viewers to feel uncomfortable," she "never had or will have any [intentions] of purposely abusing or torturing live animals under any circumstances."

Ultimately, representatives said, they will take critiques seriously and "try [their] best to create content with those in mind."

Update: this story has been updated to include a statement from YouTube and from representatives for Ssoyoung.

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