Given that a vlogger named Logan Paul recently exposed his 15 million subscribers to an image of a newly deceased suicide victim, there’s been plenty of talk about YouTube’s responsibilities as a publisher this week.
Paul, who hails from Ohio, reportedly makes around a million dollars a month from his exploits and describes himself, on his YouTube page, as a “22 year old kid in Hollywood making crazy daily Vlogs!” In general, this involves him doing dumb stuff like teasing his own dog with food tied to a drone (side note: there is a special place in Hell for people who are mean to dogs) and, like, eating really hot tortilla chips? Or something? He shouts a lot, has Trumpian hair and, like a lot of YouTube stars, reminds you of the kind of inane celebrities that emerged in the mid-noughties reality TV boom.
In his now-deleted, most controversial upload, entitled ‘We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest…’, Paul and his goons visited the Aokigahara forest at the base of Mount Fuji, Japan. The site is a notorious spot for suicides, and the vlogger stumbled upon a dead body. A man had hanged himself from a tree. Before he removed the video, 6.5 million viewers watched Paul joke about the body (“What, you never stand next to a dead guy!?”).
How did the video even find it way to Logan’s young audience? Because the channel has a ‘publish first, ask questions later’ policy. As online culture expert Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies at the University of California, has said: “YouTube is absolutely complicit in these kinds of things, in the sense that their entire economic model… for revenue creation is created fundamentally on people like Logan Paul.”
Back in November, writer James Bridle published an excellent, impassioned blog post about the weird, unpredictable, unregulated nature of YouTube’s algorithmic set-up. On both the main service and its supposedly child-friendly app YouTube Kids, sketchy videos are being served up alongside content design for young audiences. These can be either a) adult parodies of children’s programmes or b) much uglier Frankenstein’s monsters spliced together by anonymous content creators farming search terms for parts.
The writer cites a video named ‘Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes’. In the video, various Disney characters – Aladdin, The Genie and more – are detached from their own heads. The heads then rotate above them, landing on the wrong bodies, before eventually relocating the correct one. When it’s incorrect, Agnes, the little girl from , begins to cry. When it’s correct, she cheers. In both instances, the sound is that of an actual baby gurgling, which in this context is creepy in the extreme.
