YouTube Wakeup Call
The culture of YouTube has changed significantly from how it is currently, to how it was back in 2005 when the website was first launched. The platform was seen as more of an outlet to upload anything that captured the interest the uploader, without the incentive of making money in the picture yet. YouTube is now a money-making platform filled with clickbaits, lies, and desperate people going through extreme measures trying to make content that will result to a profit. YouTubers that have been there since the beginning are now threatened by the new personalities on trying to stay relevant when the platform is currently heavily reliant on numbers, as opposed to genuine quality content.
Logan Paul has been under public scrutiny for uploading a controversial video featuring a dead person during his trip to the Suicide Forest in Japan. The forest is known to be haunted and a place that draws the victims who enter to end up committing suicide. It is very common for people who enter deep into the forest to encounter bodies, but Paul unfortunately encountered a deceased corpse just as little as a hundred yards from the parking lot. He took up close shots of the body, but made an effort to blur the face for privacy reasons and was in pure shock at what he just witnessed that he resorted to distastefully joke around to ease the seriousness of the issue. His plans to participate in an overnight challenge in the forest was canceled and he notified the authorities immediately upon the encounter of the body. His reaction, along with showcasing the body, was the portion of the video that people didn’t appreciate. He claimed that his main intent was to bring forth suicide awareness, but viewers believed it caused the very opposite, despite the video beginning with a disclaimer to people who are easily triggered or sensitive to the topic.
Lately, Paul has been absent from all social media after taking down the vlog with the dead body and uploading his apology video on his YouTube channel. To make matters worse in addition to all the backlash, YouTube announced that it was going to remove Paul’s numerous channels from GooglePreferred, productions that he starred in such as The Thinning and Logan Paul Vs were put on halt, and his character in a YouTube series was dismissed. His career has faced the harsh consequences of how an abundance of fame can sway one’s choices.
This video caused a movement among YouTube personalities to speak up and change the way the platform has evolved to strictly a profit-motivated culture. Many were upset that YouTube kept the video for as long as they did on the trending page, which allowed the inappropriate content to gain more attention than it should have. It is ultimately our choice to determine where our attention goes when it comes to viewing pleasure. We are the reason that the YouTubers that don’t promote positive values create more content, but it is also up to us to speak up if it is doing more harm than good. It is time for us to focus and pay special attention to content that we find enlightening, inspiring, and motivating instead of supporting content that doesn’t help us grow as people and clutter our minds with nonsense.