It seems that we’re going to be stuck with Logan Paul. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki explained that despite showing a dead body and tasing dead rats, none of Paul’s behavior violated the site’s policies to get banned from the platform.
“When someone violates our policies three times, we terminate. We terminate accounts all the time,” Wojcicki explained. “He hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes.”
The Vine star turned YouTube sensation is one of the most popular YouTubers on the Inteernet right now, which is why when he filmed a dead body in Japan’s Aokigahara forest it received international attention. Paul apologized for his actions after a considerable outcry, but in many ways what he did has only exposed the problem with the way YouTube is choosing to deal content that very clearly crosses the line.
“On the one side is censorship, and on the other side is too much freedom of speech,” Wojcicki said. “It’s a complicated and very nuanced place where that line is drawn.”
Let’s be clear, on YouTube you can have your content removed and get strikes for making AMVs with a song that is copyrighted. Content creators have had to deal with YouTube’s bizarre standards of what was or was not “fair use” and how that even applied in a legal sense.
But Logan Paul only got temporarily suspended from paid advertising and removed from Google’s Preferred Ads program after he uploaded a video of himself tasering two dead rats.
He still gets to make content, he still gets to make money from other videos, and because his account was not deleted, he is never going to have to deal with having to build himself back up again. While Wojcicki thinks suspension has sent a message, I don’t think it’s the message YouTube intended.
Instead, all that has happened is that Logan Paul has turned from a name that was known mostly by people who frequent YouTube into to a household name. It only encourages other YouTubers wanting to get a piece of their fame to either copy this kind of behavior.
If sampling a few seconds of music or footage from a movie can cause strikes, but tasering rats and showing dead bodies isn’t, then there is something really messed up about Youtube’s priorities when it comes to regulating content creation.
(via Business Insider, image: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)
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