Shane Dawson is “not going to abandon” his YouTube channel, despite the YouTuber’s scandal-inspired hiatus. Dawson posted his first photo on Instagram since December 2020 Wednesday, sharing a shot out to dinner with fiancé Ryland Adams in what looks like a tropical location. “Dads left the house,” he began the caption.
“Ps. I know I haven’t posted a video in a long time and I promise it’s not because I don’t want to,” he continued. “I’m just trying to stay in a good mindset and be happy. I promise I’m not going to abandon my channel after 15 years of creating. Just been re-evaluating my life the last year and figuring out what I want to do with it.” Dawson wrote that “life is short,” and he remains “grateful for every second of it,” reaching out to his followers, “Hope you guys are doing well! I miss you!”
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Dawson took to YouTube in June 2020 with an apology video titled “Taking Accountability,” in which he apologized for doing blackface in racist videos, using the N-word, and joking about pedophilia earlier in his career. “I have done a lot of things in my past that I hate, that I wish I could make go away, that I tried to make go away by deleting videos or un-tagging my Instagram things or literally doing whatever I can to pretend like those things didn’t happen,” he said at the time. “Because yes, I apologized for a lot of them but I’m 31, almost 32. Those apologies suck. I don’t know who that person is anymore.”
He continued that he was hoping to “own up to my s—” and wanted to “own up to everything I’ve done on the Internet that has hurt people, that has added to a problem, that has not been handled well.” Agreeing he should be “punished” for his previous behavior, Dawson acknowledged “all the racism that [he] put onto the Internet” as an adult. “Now, years later, I look back at that,” he said. “When I say I hate that person, I mean it in the most intense way possible.”
Dawson acknowledged at the time that he thought his career could possibly be over after YouTube stopped allowing ads on his channel. “I’m willing to lose everything,” he said. “At this point, realizing how many people I’ve hurt, or how many people I’ve inspired to say awful things or do anything awful, to finally just own up to all of this and be accountable is worth losing everything to me.”
