Shane Dawson, American comedian and actor

Shane Lee Yaw (born July 19, 1988), known professionally as Shane Dawson, is an American YouTuber. He became one of the first people to rise to fame on the video-sharing platform YouTube.In 2008, at age 19, Dawson began making videos on YouTube and garnered over half a billion views by 2010. Most of his early work consisted of sketch comedy videos, where he would play original characters, impersonate celebrities and make light of popular culture. Some of these impressions later drew criticism for their offensive content, including racial stereotypes.

During this time, Dawson also had a short-lived music career, releasing six original songs such as "Superluv!" and numerous parodies of popular music videos. In 2013, he launched his podcast, Shane and Friends, which ran for four years and produced 140 episodes. The following year, Dawson released his first and only feature film, Not Cool, and appeared on an accompanying 10 episode docu-series The Chair. He has also appeared in the films Smiley (2012) and Internet Famous (2016).

In 2015, Dawson began his show on YouTube about conspiracy theories, which includes his 2019 web series Conspiracy Series with Shane Dawson. In late 2017, he released his first docu-series on YouTube, in which he reconciled with his absent father. From 2019 to 2020, Dawson created and appeared in The Beautiful World of Jeffree Star, a docu-series that follows the life of Jeffree Star, which garnered over 130 million views. His most viewed docu-series are about Jake Paul, Jeffree Star, and TanaCon.As of 2018, Dawson has released two New York Times best-selling books, I Hate Myselfie (2015) and It Gets Worse (2016), and his three YouTube channels have accumulated over 4.5 billion views. Since 2017, he maintains one active channel, shane, with 20 million subscribers and over 4 billion views. On June 30, 2020, YouTube indefinitely suspended monetization on all three of Dawson's channels following a public backlash over his past controversial comments. He returned to YouTube on October 7, 2021.