Logan Paul and the Problems with YouTube

Jonathan Tostevin|January 16, 2018

Logan Paul is a 22 year old YouTuber with over 15 million subscribers who, with his brother Jake Paul and the rest of the Team 10 House, is infamous within the YouTube community for doing controversial and socially unacceptable things. These acts have heralded disapproval from popular YouTubers and celebrities alike. But, notably, YouTube has still continued  supporting Logan and his brother Jake, despite their questionable antics.

The most recent scandal with Logan was when, in one of his vlogging videos, he went to a known forest for suicide victims in Japan, to investigate the so-called “haunted aspect of the forest.” The video shows him going into the forest with 3 friends and coming across a dead body. He stands next to the body and then jokes, “What, you never stood next to a dead guy?” before laughing. This is especially shocking because Logan Paul’s main demographic is the younger pre-teen audience.

The other problem is that YouTube seems to be on the side of Logan Paul and his ‘Logang’, possibly because they are a source of A LOT of money. According to SocialBlade, Logan Paul earns $973.7K – $15.6M per year. Furthermore, this controversy has even increased video views to Logan’s channel by 324 million views in the last 30 days, an undoubtedly large amount of those coming from the large publicity of this whole controversy.

This begs the question of YouTube’s algorithm and how it claims to be neutral, but removes and demonetize videos that they do not agree with. The first example after the so-called ‘adpocalypse’ is the demonetizing of videos by people making videos on content that are in anyway controversial at all. Channels like PragerU, a political channel and h3h3productions, who makes comedy videos are commonly demonetized for these reasons. An example of this happened during the Las Vegas shooting when Casey Neistat, a popular youtuber made a video on the topic, with all the ad revenue to be donated to charity. The video made by Neistat was demonetized and Youtube replied that they don’t monetize videos on tragedies. Jimmy Kimmel also made a video on the tragedy, which was monetized. Youtube have claimed to have fixed the issue, but it still brings a question to their moral judgement.

While YouTube was once a simple platform for artists and entertainers to share their work, it is clear to see that it has evolved into a breeding ground for controversy. And while Logan Paul’s actions are deplorable, what is equally disturbing is his immense fan base and revenue. As we move further and further into the digital age, we find ourselves increasingly interested in the controversial and the immature.