UNITED STATES • Jenna Mourey, a YouTube personality who became one of the platform's first mainstream female stars as Jenna Marbles, said last Thursday she was going to stop her channel amid backlash over old videos that she made in blackface and mocking Asian people.

Mourey, whose channel has more than 20 million subscribers, apologised in a video for the content, which she made in 2011 and 2012 when she had just established her channel. She said she was abandoning the platform to "hold myself accountable".

"I am ashamed of things I have done and said in my past," the 33-year-old said.

Unlike many other Internet celebrities, Mourey has been making videos for more than a decade and managed to remain successful on YouTube, a platform that can be hugely profitable for people making content on it.

She said in the 11-minute video she wanted to address the videos as "we're at a time where we are purging ourselves of anything and everything toxic".

"I think now it's hard for that content to exist at all, because I think people watch it and don't bother to look at when it was posted or care about what path I took to get to where I am.

"It offends them now and, if that's the case - where people will watch something and be offended now - I don't want it to exist."

Mourey said some of the offending videos had previously been made private, but that she was publicly addressing them because she was getting questions on social media about why she had done so.

She explained that she did not want to contribute to putting out "negative things in the world".

The YouTuber wanted to address two clips specifically.

She replayed one of her impersonating rapper Nicki Minaj in 2011 while wearing a pink wig and with her skin darkened and said it was not her intention to do blackface.

Mourey also played another clip from 2011, which she called "a bad year for me in judgment", that featured her singing a rap song.

In that video, she is wearing a hat that resembles a Vietnamese non la and says sarcastically she was being "racist" after mocking Asian people by performing an offensive stereotype.

She also apologised for a video she made in 2012 "ranting about girls sleeping around" that she said demonstrated she had "internalised misogyny".

The social media personality said she would move on from posting videos on her channel, but she did not know for how long or whether it would be a permanent departure from the online world she had created.

Her immediate plans: "Just live and just be. That's it."

NYTIMES