The activism of some supporters extended beyond legal grounds; vandalism, hacking of websites, social media accounts, personal devices and the creation of malware had taken place to urge people to subscribe.

On 28 April 2019, PewDiePie released a video calling for his supporters to end their efforts to keep him as the most subscribed YouTube channel after the Christchurch mosque shootings, where the terrorist mentioned his name before the massacre.

[15][17][18][19] YouTuber Justin Roberts, a member of the group Team 10, bought a billboard in New York's Times Square reading the same slogan.

[18][20][21] Jacksepticeye ran a live stream with the same purpose, jokingly threatening to delete his channel if T-Series surpassed PewDiePie.

[21][28] In January 2019, more than 65,000 of Google's Chromecast streaming dongles were hacked by HackerGiraffe and j3ws3r, displaying a message on smart TVs urging people to subscribe to PewDiePie and adjust their security settings.

[29][30] However, despite positive feedback from some people, one of the hackers anonymously revealed to the BBC that he suffered a breakdown due to the prospect of facing jail time and angry messages urging him to commit suicide, but did not regret lowering the number of vulnerable personal devices.

In December 2018, one of The Wall Street Journal's websites was hacked to display a message apologizing for articles accusing PewDiePie of antisemitism and to tell readers to subscribe to his YouTube channel.

[27] In February 2019, Bob Buckhorn, the mayor of Tampa, Florida, had his Twitter account hacked to post malicious tweets, one of these encouraging users to subscribe to PewDiePie.

[33] On 22 March 2019, a user on the PewDiePie subreddit developed ransomware by the name PewCrypt that encrypted files on Microsoft Windows machines.

[34] On 4 November 2018, a group of young fans began to hand out posters in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh,[35] which PewDiePie acknowledged in a YouTube video.

[36][37] On 27 February 2019, Basketball Club Žalgiris based in Kaunas, Lithuania, had cheerleaders performing "Bitch Lasagna" during a time-out.

In response, there was a march in Pakistan where protesters held signs reading "Unsubscribe T-Series" and expressed their support for PewDiePie.

[51] Another vandalism case occurred two days prior when "SUB 2 pewdiepie" was written on a school's property in Oxford, United Kingdom.

On 1 January 2019, Indian YouTuber CarryMinati, released a diss track called "Bye PewDiePie", which garnered nearly 5 million views in 24 hours.

[55] On 5 October 2018, PewDiePie, in collaboration with musician Party In Backyard, posted a diss track against T-Series, titled "Bitch Lasagna".

[60] In the song, he insults T-Series and their video contents, makes references to contemporary Indian stereotypes and accuses the company of using sub bots to gain false subscriptions.

[13] Speaking to Metro in November 2018, PewDiePie said that he was "surprised no one has stepped up sooner", referring to T-Series competing for the most-subscribed spot.

[64] In December 2018, PewDiePie made a video calling on his viewers to support the Indian non-governmental organization Child Rights and You, in response to some of his fans' anti-Indian sentiment.

He raised £173,682, including a donation by Minecraft creator Markus Persson, and also ran a charity live stream the next day.

[19][71][72] In the music video, PewDiePie mocks how T-Series sent him a cease and desist letter alleging that his actions and lyrics of "Bitch Lasagna" were defamatory.

The video also criticizes T-Series for alleged tax evasion and the fact that the company was founded through the selling of pirated songs.

"[4] He also discussed the mental toll the Christchurch shooter's mention of his name had on him, stating "to have my name associated with something so unspeakably vile has affected me in more ways than I've let shown.

[78] Following the 2019 Christchurch shootings, Kevin Roose of The New York Times wrote that the perpetrator's goal behind saying "subscribe to PewDiePie" during his livestream of the attack "may have been to pull a popular internet figure into a fractious blame game and inflame political tensions everywhere.

"[82] Kalyan further added that the channel's overseas viewership had increased as a result of the subscriber race, stating that "people in the West, or in the East as far as Japan were not even aware of us.

Despite PewDiePie's statement that these diss tracks were "done in good fun", the court issued a temporary injunction in favour of T-Series on 8 April 2019.

The complaint against Kjellberg claimed that his songs were "defamatory, disparaging, insulting, and offensive," and noted that comments on the videos were "abusive, vulgar, and also racist in nature."

[63] The Guardian's Nosheen Iqbal described T-Series as "a challenger from the streets of Delhi", referring to the origins of its founder Gulshan Kumar, who was a fruit juice seller when he founded the company.

She described PewDiePie's antagonism as "all for show" and stated that "rivalries play a huge role on YouTube because they give viewers narratives where pseudo-heroes and villains exist with low (if any) stakes.

Journalist Ravi Agrawal said that India quickly progressed to cheap mobile phones by skipping slower initial technological advances in the west.

[47] Vice reported that T-Series' success lay in focusing on regional audiences and having no competitors in online music in India.