On New Year’s Eve, Logan Paul, a YouTube creator and popular social media figure, stirred up the latest controversy surrounding YouTube content. He uploaded a vlog of his exploration of Aokigahara, a national forest in Japan, which has become known as a prevalent site for suicide. In this video, he found a body, and recorded it on tape. After the social media outcry ensued, he recorded an apology video and released a Twitter statement.
It is pretty easy to agree that what Logan Paul did was despicable and should not have happened. But the fact that it did happen points to a greater issue YouTube is facing as a platform.
A few weeks ago, YouTube’s moderation and terms of service were called into question as disturbing videos of child exploitation were gaining rounds. As an open platform which favors the creator—an average person with a camera—it is open to controversial content. In fact, it invites controversial content. And this is a good thing. But the fact that anyone can upload to YouTube means that anyone can be a broadcaster. No doubt before Paul’s video was taken down, it was seen by hundreds of thousands of people, at least. And considering the young age demographic of Paul’s audience, likely many of those viewers were children.
Also, as a money-making platform, YouTube inadvertently encourages an ‘anything for views’ mindset. Logan Paul exploited a victim of suicide for views and clicks. Although he didn’t admit to exploitation being his intention, and the video was not monetized at the time that it was taken down, the point still stands because attention is currency. This so-called attention economy is nothing new. But on a platform like YouTube, where anyone can broadcast anything and viewing any kind of content is just a click away, this becomes especially problematic—particularly when the platform is struggling with its moderation.
This incident also points to a problem in the way we talk about mental illness. In Paul’s Twitter statement, he stated that his intention for the video was to ‘raise awareness.’ The concept of ‘raising awareness,’ (as Emily Reynolds said in her article in The Guardian, “Logan Paul has behaved despicably. But he’s part of a wider trend”) has become so overused that it has lost any significant meaning it may have once had. This is because of people like Paul using it to excuse “problematic behaviors” to get themselves “off the hook.” Real awareness-raising, like Reynolds said, is invaluable when it comes from people who have experience with mental illness themselves. It is important to reduce the social and cultural stigma around having a mental illness for many reasons, including to make it more likely that someone would seek help. YouTube has proven to be a platform for people to speak openly about their mental illness for true awareness, like with creators Anna Akana and John Green, who have both opened up about their own struggles with mental health.
The idea that anyone can participate is a strength of YouTube. Creator-fueled media is a unique perspective which belongs to the 21st century. It brings about positive and valuable content, a vast majority of the time, if not simply because it is a practice in freedom of speech.
The difficulty with moderating an open platform like YouTube is creating a moderation system that prevents truly offensive content, like the aforementioned Logan Paul vlog, from being broadcast in the first place, yet not censoring content that should not be censored.
This is the current problem that YouTube faces. In moving forward as a platform, YouTube will need to revise its moderation policies to make sure that this kind of content does not get the platform it got.
Photo by Aaron Hemens
