Today, YouTube announced that it has temporarily suspended all ads on 22-year-old prankster Logan Paul's channel, cutting off what is estimated to be nearly $1 million in monthly revenue. The crackdown came after Paul pulled a live fish from the water to give it faux CPR as it squirmed, then shot a dead rat with a taser in one of the first videos after his return.
Paul had taken a hiatus from YouTube after he was rightly and widely criticized for uploading a video with a dead body he found in a forest in Japan known for its suicides. Initially, he returned with an apologetic video and a promise to change his ways and focus efforts on suicide prevention. Very quickly, though, he was back to his old antics.
YouTube provided the following statement to The Washington Post when it announced the suspension:
This is not a decision we made lightly. We believe he has exhibited a pattern of behavior in his videos that makes his channel not only unsuitable for advertisers, but also potentially damaging to the broader creator community.
When Paul's suicide forest video was published, YouTube did not act until critical voices coalesced on social media and in the press. It eventually removed him from its premium ad market, Google Preferred. Now Paul has made it crystal clear that he has not learned his lesson, despite the apologetic tone he briefly struck.
Content enforcement Whack-a-Mole
Logan Paul is still doing what he has always done, and despite this new action, YouTube doesn't appear to have learned much from past controversies, either. It has been repeatedly criticized by YouTubers and outsiders alike for being inconsistent in its enforcement of community and content policies.
Why has YouTube disabled ads completely on Paul's channel now, after a video in which he mocks a rat's corpse (tamer than some of his other videos) and not when he made a joke out of a human body in December? For that matter, why did YouTube remove Paul's preferred status over the human body video but not first over those videos immediately preceding it in which Paul harassed and disrespected Tokyo residents with culturally insensitive pranks—especially after YouTube had rescinded preferred status from fellow YouTuber PewDiePie for similar behavior? Why is the company cracking down on Paul but not on numerous other YouTubers producing similarly problematic content?
YouTube has guidelines for content on its platform, but it seems to only enforce them when the volume of public outrage has reached a certain decibel level—and even then, it does so in opaque and inadequate ways.
Maybe YouTube took this action because its previous discipline didn't really hurt Paul at all. Despite a lot of talk from YouTube about better vetting of videos in the Google Preferred program, cutting the biggest stars off from that program won't preclude their success. Paul has asked his followers to make up the difference by buying merch from his store, which is not hosted on YouTube. Further, he bragged that he actually gained one million subscribers during his month-long hiatus and after YouTube's first disciplinary action.
He may have gained subscribers because the teens who watch his channel do so because his themes of rebellion against norms and authority resonate with them, so the more authority figures crack down, the more popular he becomes with his audience. The problems YouTube faces can't be handled with slaps on the wrist to select targets the company is compelled to make an example of.
While YouTube's new, harsher action against Paul is welcome, the inconsistency of its responses gives the impression that its actions stem from a fear of alienated advertisers, not from a sense of responsibility to the community.
Paul and YouTube are both locked in battles of self-preservation, but neither seems to understand the true scope of their problems. Maybe they deserve one another.
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