YouTube’s changes and developments have always sat in the background of my own life, and how my interaction with the Internet has changed over time. As a child, YouTube was about searching High School Musical songs and dancing around the living room. It was about funny cat videos, sneezing pandas and adorable babies. It was about everyday life and communities of people coming together — voicing the unvoiced and sharing likes and dislikes. The site carried its massive “Broadcast Yourself” tagline with pride, presenting a platform for self- expression and representation. It was never about the subscribers, views or merch. It was about you as an individual.
When the Paul brothers joined the YouTube scene, I hadn’t really noticed until the site made sure I did. Quite quickly, I found myself exposed to reaction videos, parody videos and ‘drama channel’ videos trickling into my feed. I forced myself to understand exactly why this was relevant. Unlike the favourite YouTube videos I had growing up, there was nothing I enjoyed about the content, but the views and subscribers left me curious. It made me question myself and the content I was already subscribed to: “should I be interested in the Paul brothers? Should I have to like them? They’re clearly popular for a reason…”
My interests were becoming shaped around an algorithm, and so they weren’t my own anymore. I’d been sucked into an exploitative narrative forcing me to become interested in what was Popular and Trending. I gradually began judging the credibility of a video according to its views and subscribers. I was suddenly a customer in the YouTube marketplace: trends and views made the Paul brothers a hot commodity to buy into. Was I in the Logang or was I a Jake Pauler? I was neither! The content wasn’t for me, and yet I kept getting dragged into it. It felt suffocating, and the suffocation only increased when Logan Paul’s vlog in Japan’s “suicide forest” flooded through my feed. It was the first time I became aware that YouTube no longer cared for broadcasting my voice, but cared for commodifying it.
For me, the most problematic part of the video was the layers of watching. The Japanese body became Othered by the privileged white man’s camera that watched him and laughed. “What, you never stand next to a dead guy?” Logan jokes, as though the body is a prop in the grand scheme of “Logang” success. We, as viewers, viewed the suicide through this gaze, and it only reinforced the power structures that ‘Broadcast Yourself’ once sought to break down. I thought about my favourite YouTuber Superwoman’s videos in comparison. As an Indian woman watching her content about being an Indian-Canadian, I laughed with her. I understood her life because of how much it resembled my own. She had expressed her voice and allowed me to find mine. My non- Indian friends that I shared the video with were watching one form of self-representation and laughing alongside her, not at her. She was using the platform to establish communities and relationships, and I felt a strong sense of identification with her, as did my non-Indian friends who also enjoyed her content. It’s disappointing as a woman of colour to see YouTube detracting from this foundation of self-representation that it was built upon. In fact, it terrifies me that YouTube can allow for this Othering of bodies that the internet has always broken down. Do I only matter if this white-centric algorithm decides that I do?
Logan Paul’s apology, which argues that he is “raising awareness” for mental health, takes the “Broadcast Yourself” narrative and makes it another trend. Somehow, “raising awareness” means Othering a body for the white gaze, and exploiting it for continued recognition and privilege that the Japanese man has been denied. All knowledge of that man’s life – his achievements, his goals, everything he had worked for – becomes dissolved in the image that has been pushed forward to millions of people all over the world. “Awareness” is not being raised as much as it’s being taken away, and this introduces another problem with YouTube and content creation. Exposure to the suicide forest has opened up a new discourse surrounding mental health and suicide in Japan, but Logan Paul claims ownership of it. The platform is made his, and so the self is not “broadcasted” but commodified. If this is the case, then watching a video becomes watching through the white gaze as well. To allow exposure for that repressed voice is to penetrate through the power structures being established online, where one account is made more credible than the other because of their online “wealth”.
What does this mean for Japanese people with mental health issues, who are now more repressed than ever? The ownership of the freedom of their online voices have also been taken away from them, whilst the society itself turns a blind eye to high suicide rates and mental health issues that are not being discussed. Logan Paul and YouTube have created something toxic, sensationalising voices that do not belong to them and encouraging us to watch with through a white-centric perspective.
This is why it is not enough for YouTube to suspend working with Logan Paul. The algorithmic construction of the site is the problem, in the way that it decides certain videos matter more than other simply because of their views. What is being said here is that YouTube continues to work as a commercial marketplace rather than as the hub of self-representation and good content that we remember it for. We need a space for people to have their voices heard, to unify communities together, to break through the taboos that society won’t discuss. Where do we turn to if YouTube chooses clicks over content? What happens to the unheard voices?