Logan Paul Controversy: How Exactly You Tube Is Complicit in The Choices of Its Stars?

From content moderation, what can we anticipate? What can we expect from platforms, then? Logan Paul, a 22-year-old YouTube celebrity with over 15 million subscribers, published a contentious video last week that focused attention on these issues.

Paul Has Gathered Hordes of Adoring Admirers Thanks to His Videos

Paul has gathered hordes of adoring admirers thanks to his videos, which are a never-ending torrent of brags, tricks, and stunts. But after publishing a video showing him and several friends exploring the Japanese area known as the “suicide forest” and discovering a young man's body that appeared to have recently been hanged, he came under fire from the public.

Instead of turning the camera off, Paul persisted with his shenanigans, shifting back and forth between astonishment and irreverence while pointing out the body's details and his own response. His swelling hand was featured in close-ups while the video continued to focus on the body. Paul's responses were nasty and self-centered.

Various Forms of Responsibility, Include Content Moderation

Last year, YouTube had to deal with a number of problems, many of which included children, their exploitation, and their vulnerability as viewers. Popular vlogger PewDiePie was the subject of controversy after it was discovered that his videos had Nazi and anti-Semitic humor. Then there were the videos that eluded the more stringent guidelines YouTube sets for its Kids app: homemade animations with well-known characters and third acts to their stories that were very disquieting.

The discovery of entire YouTube channels full of videos of children being mistreated, terrified and exploited — for example, young children in revealing clothing restrained with ropes or tape — seemed designed to get around YouTube's rules against violence and child exploitation. This was quickly after that.

A few days later, BuzzFeed revealed that YouTube's autocomplete tool had produced results that appeared to be related to child trafficking. (Autofill will suggest “how to have s*x with your kids” if you wrote “how to have”). Videos about LGBTQ and transgender topics were among those that were arguably improperly banned from the more limited Kids mode earlier in the year.

Is Content Moderation the Most Effective Way to Handle This Obligation?

Some claimed that YouTube ought to have taken down the video prior to Paul's action. As far as we can determine, YouTube critics did not at first sight. ( Based only on this Twitter data, it appears that the video was evaluated but left in place. Simply read through the extensive thread of comments that followed this tweet to get a sense of the full variety of disagreements regarding what YouTube should have done.

Paul did receive a “strike”—a warning—on his account. Even though a lot of users reported the video as offensive, a huge number of people still watched it, which allowed it to become popular. A YouTube spokesperson stated that the video should have been removed because it was “shocking, sensational, or rude” in its public relations response to the incident.

What Role YouTube Plays in The Star-Choice Decisions of Its Stars

This does not mean that platforms are excused from accountability for the content they help spread. In no way. YouTube is involved because it gives Logan the chance to share his offensive video, assists him in amassing millions of viewers who will receive it instantly in their feeds, designs and fine-tunes the recommendation algorithms that increase its reach, and makes huge profits from the advertising fees it generates.

To better comprehend the relationship between producers and platforms, some critics are doing the crucial work of examining platforms. But it is really tempting to generalize about platforms and draw a line between the phenomenon and the provider. YouTube is currently a villain in the eyes of the media.

However, when we draw these complicity boundaries too clearly, we make a mistake. Yes, Logan Paul‘s popularity is financially beneficial to YouTube. That by itself does not demonstrate complicity; rather, it must be a component of our understanding of complicity. We could prefer that increased platform responsibilities accompany revenue sharing.

Or, regardless of the funding arrangement, we might desire platforms to be immune from responsibility or liability. Whether or whether there is revenue sharing, we might also want equal obligations. Or perhaps we want duties that prioritize popularity above revenue. All of these accountability frameworks are viable options.