Less than a week into January and it's fair to say 2018 has been a bad year for
Logan Paul, or has it? Welcome back to What's Trending, I'm Grant Pardee.
Throughout the week, we've heard a lot of anger and outrage from the mainstream
media from YouTube creators and even from celebrities towards Logan Paul, but
one group we have not heard a lot from are longtime fans of Logan Paul. In fact,
a portion of Logan's fans spent this week attacking Reina Scully on Twitter
after she had posted a video responding to Logan Paul's Suicide Woods video
describing why it was offensive to her as a Japanese American. Reina shared
those hateful messages and she also received sympathy and support from other
YouTube creators. And racism towards Asians is something that Logan Paul
seems to have a bit of a history with. Over the years, Logan Paul has made a
number of tweets and videos that made fun of Asians and were basically racist
in nature seemingly because he could just sort of get away with it as opposed
to a few chosen a different minority group. Logan's video about the Suicide
Woods aside, his trip to Japan was not well-received by the Japanese in general.
In Logan's video from December 30th, called "We Fought in the Middle of Tokyo,"
he records himself walking in the middle of the street and sticking his camera in
people's faces and in their cars. And look, it's one thing to be the annoying
goofball character in Western Society, but in places like Japan, it's a far more
offensive thing. Tokyo, specifically. Thanks for putting up with your boy.
Japan has strict privacy laws about filming and photography even
in public places, but what does he care? Not caring is part of his whole Maverick
thing, so if he's kind of pissing people off... Hey, man. That's your problem, not mine.
I'm the cool dude! Nevertheless, comments on the video from Japanese were not
particularly kind. ere are some of those reactions, which the blog Kotaku,
helpfully translated into English. "Go home. He's insulting Japanese people.
You're bothering Japanese people. Dumb American. Can you even follow the rules?
If you're going to just come and bother people, please don't come back to Japan
again. I'll never forgive you for insulting Japan and the Japanese people.
Don't treat food like that. Also, what you think is funny is not." So, even aside from
the whole video filming a corpse in the Suicide Woods, it seems like Logan was
not really getting that he might not be suited to the cultural tastes in Japan.
It's almost as though he doesn't quite grasp that these are real people, it's a
real city, and a real culture. Instead, they're being treated
more like background extras in his videos. Now, to be clear, this is not a
problem with Logan Paul exclusively. In fact,
other pranksters on YouTube have had more controversies than Logan who has
traditionally maintained a pretty squeaky clean and advertiser friendly
image. Especially compared to Logan's brother, Jake Paul, who is far more
frequently crossed into the lines of offensive content especially considering
that his audience is mostly pre-teen girls. Earlier this week, in fact, Jake
Paul stirred his own controversy with a video titled "I Lost My Virginity," that
originally featured a sexually graphic thumbnail. Like, dude! Are you not seeing
what's going on with your brother? There's... maybe just lay low for like a
minute? But I want to be clear, even as I'm being critical of Logan Pau, that
I don't think that his fans are dumb or that his popularity is an accident. Look,
I mean, I get it. The dude is athletic and charming. He's a hunky Disney prince
who just wants to have a good time and make you laugh. The larger problem is how
we all seem to interact on social media, and the fact that this very negative
story seems to have no negative impact on Logan Paul himself. Because for all
the outrage, it doesn't appear that Logan is actually losing any fans. It's the
opposite. He's gaining them. In fact, the day after the suicide video went
mainstream, 81,000 new people subscribed to Logan's channel. Compare
that to before the scandal when he was adding about 17,000 new subscribers
daily. Which begs the question: Is there a such thing as bad press on YouTube? Maybe
not. Part of the problem, as pointed out in videos this week by Philip DeFranco,
Keemstar, and Pyrocynical, is the lack of oversight
from YouTube itself. Of course, this is assuming that you agree that filming a
dead body is a problem. Because part of the reason that Logan's Suicide Woods
video accumulated so many views was that it was the number one video in YouTube's
Trending Section for hours before it was removed. And it was removed by Logan Paul,
himself, or someone on his team, as opposed to YouTube. Meaning that there
was no oversight and that is a problem. What is happening and who's in control
of this? Now, YouTube has said, previously, that they're Trending Section is curated
with both a mix of approved creators, who are white listed because they're
advertiser friendly, like Logan Paul, and by advertisers themselves. Like, clips
from the NFL with highlight videos, which don't bring the kinds of views that
other creators might. At best, their process is painfully opaque, but listen.
The larger issue here is that we've now had social media like YouTube, Twitter,
Instagram, Snapchat, whatever it is embedded into our daily lives, as a core
part of our daily lives, for more than 10 years now and we're getting to a point
where we're wondering who is in charge of all this? What happens when people are
posting hateful speech? What if they're posting offensive content showing dead
bodies that even the creator of that video agrees that it was wrong? But who's
in control of that? Essentially, it's coming down to a censorship vs. free
speech debate, which I know people love arguing that! Earlier this week,
protesters used a spotlight to call out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey calling him
complicit in the escalation of potential nuclear war after President Trump's
tweet jokingly threatened to bomb North Korea. YouTube, Twitter, all of these
different social media platforms - they're private companies, so it is up to them to
decide what is part of their guidelines and what violates those guidelines. And,
of course, what is deemed offensive is entirely subjective. It's a personal
taste thing, but like I said, the video that Logan made about the Suicide Woods
was very offensive to a lot of people. Logan, himself, admitted this was wrong,
but he was the one that had to take it down. The question becomes: Is that how
things should work? Or should there be greater oversight, basically to protect
us from ourselves? Because if you ask Logan Paul's fans, it seems like they
don't really care. It's fine with them. It doesn't matter.
Keep filming dead bodies. Just keep being a cool hunk, dude! Doesn't, it doesn't
matter! I think it's incredibly disheartening that his subscribers went
up. I mean, because a lot of this is based on people chasing views, so if they're
being rewarded with views and subscribers for doing anything, including
filming dead bodies, then they're just going to keep doing that. They're going
to follow where the views are. And unless YouTube or Twitter or some grown-up in
this scenario intercedes, it's hard to see how we're going to not just become
the basest, most vile versions of ourselves.
There's not really an easy answer to this. It's just another example in the
ongoing censorship vs. free speech debate. Just one of the forms that it's
taking. So, let us know what you think! COMMENT below. We'd love to hear it, and for
more stories like this, go to whatstrending.com.