Why YouTuber Logan Paul can't put his camera down

[OliKMIA]

Good article Andrew but unfortunately the regular TV is not much better. How many time did TV networks show us people getting killed almost live during conflict or natural disaster (hurricanes, kid drowning, earthquake, etc.). Not much difference except that the news "reporter" has the fake decency to look sad and give you a "viewer advice".

Another deplorable habits is when "journalist" rush and point their cameras at grieving family members who just lost a love one in plane crash. What's the informative value of this? Like, "hey, I'm John from Trash TV, I have nothing to show because you know the plane is missing, but since your wife and two kids were in the plane, can you please tell me how you feel". This is simply disgusting.

Finally the censorship is a delicate question because it's always hard to draw the line and set the limits of what can or should not be broadcasted.

[Cliff Totten]

I think we need to be careful about wanting to limit the voices of idiots on the web. Everybody, no matter how despicable we think they are, has a right to speak their mind. I think we would all be going down a VERY slippery slope if we started censoring people that we think that dont have the morale values that we have.

The guy is a total ass. But he should have that right to be an ass. We certainly have the right to ignore him. Censorship is a very, VERY dangerous thing and its potential for abuse is massive once you start approving ways to justify doing it.

Censorship is FAR more dangerous to society than this dick-head ever will be.

[Damphousse]

 

Is Youtube even profitable?  I agree something needs to be done to prevent children from seeing stuff like this but I don't think Youtube is being "greedy".  Last I heard they were struggling just to be about break even.  That is not to say that I don't think they may be "greedy" in the future.  I just wanted to point out there are probably modest small businesses in your home town that you've never heard of that may be more profitable than Youtube.

12 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Oh, and as for censorship, I don't believe in any of that. "We don't have free speech to talk about the weather".

You show pron to grade school children?!

I think we all censor and obviously the government censors and throws people in jail for breaking the rules...  And I think we all agree that is a good thing.

7 hours ago, IronFilm said:

I was a bit shocked when I realised last week that my GF had never heard of Logan Paul, seeing as she spends most of her free time on YouTube!

That's not the way youtube works.

4 hours ago, Jonesy Jones said:

With no objective moral standard, who can really say Paul is wrong?

Laughing at the dead body of a man who died alone in despair?  You are going to have to work hard to explain to me where the ambiguity is.

2 hours ago, no_connection said:

Don't know who that is and I don't think I have seen him.

None of my youtube recommended content have any of what you are talking about. What you watch is what you get I guess.

Exactly.

35 minutes ago, Cliff Totten said:

I think we need to be careful about wanting to limit the voices of idiots on the web. Everybody, no matter how despicable we think they are, has a right to speak their mind. I think we would all be going down a VERY slippery slope if we started censoring people that we think that dont have the morale values that we have.

The guy is a total ass. But he should have that right to be an ass. We certainly have the right to ignore him. Censorship is a very, VERY dangerous thing and its potential for abuse is massive once you start approving ways to justify doing it.

Censorship is FAR more dangerous to society than this dick-head ever will be.

How many of you are showing pron to children on this forum?!  I don't know of any society that doesn't have some controls in place.  I've never heard any parent in any country grumble about the laws that prevent the exposure of children to pron.

Andrew pointed out something egregious.  Don't show videos of people laughing at unfortunate suicide victims.  Where is the slope?

 

Really to me this is about children.  Youtube is an amazing repository of knowledge.  Unfortunately I'm not in school anymore but I marvel at all the tutorials on the internet on a variety of topics.  If I had children I would love to turn them loose on youtube and have them learn about whatever interests them.  Unfortunately I've heard too many stories from parents about their kids being exposed to pornographic things on Youtube.  They leave the kid watching a cute cartoon and come back in the room 15 minutes later and some kind of sick cartoon pron is on.  It's ridiculous.  The very generation that would benefit the most from the internet is the one that has to be banned from using it because of nonsense like this.

I like the .xxx top level domain.  It would be nice if all the lewd stuff was required to use that so you could do a router level filter at your house and not subject your children to pron.

Youtube should require videos with adult themes, strong language, nudity, sex, violence, or dead bodies to tag their videos for each applicable category.  That way the user could filter youtube search results and not see that stuff.  There will definitely be some gray area but crap like this and pornographic cartoons at least will be filtered out.

4 hours ago, Jonesy Jones said:

"Ethics" and "moral standards" are tossed around the article as if there are any. Everyone has an opinion about what should or shouldn't happen, but no one is willing to own up to an actual objective standard of morality with which to base said opinions. With no objective moral standard, who can really say Paul is wrong? You can't. I mean, you can, but not with any soundness to your position. With no moral foundation, none of you are right, or wrong.

The 20th century was all about eliminating objective morality. The 21st century is living with the consequences.

Maybe I was being a bit harsh.  I see what you are saying.  I just don't think we are there yet.  But we really are trying our best to destroy all standards.  If we bring kids up on this stuff their moral compass is definitely going to be defective.

[fuzzynormal]

5 hours ago, Jonesy Jones said:

objective moral standard

Defining that is a sticky wicket, ain't it?

[IronFilm]

5 hours ago, Germy1979 said:

I agree.  - but we democratized the platform and now we have Logan Paul.  At least in the 20th, there was a sense of duty when it came to quality...  There was a bar, even if the 80's gave us "Gotcha" the paintball movie.  I'm kinda with Ridley Scott at the director's round table when he says 1000 films a year is probably 500 too many.  There is no filter anymore, no plot, and people don't demand more from their entertainment.... So there again, we have Logan Paul. 

Was there any "quality bar" beforehand?

I don't think so!!

There was only the very high financial bar, stopping many productions being made.

 

Which I'm very glad has been abolished!

[IronFilm]

4 hours ago, no_connection said:

Don't know who that is and I don't think I have seen him.

It is a little surprising and a little sad when I see so many comments like this.

Because we're all media creators here, yet we're totally unaware of one of the biggest media creators on the biggest media platform of them all?!

As Logan Paul was one of the biggest vloggers of 2017, his content has billions and billions and billions of views across all the platforms.

For all the obsession this forum has about Casey Neistat, he is small fry next to the Paul brothers.

Next people here will be telling me they don't know who PewDiePie or Jon Olsson are....

[Mattias Burling]

16 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Next people here will be telling me they don't know who PewDiePie or Jon Olsson are....

Ive seen interviews with them since they are Swedish but never seen their work. I haven't seen more than two videos by casey.

And imho, I think you are making to big of a deal about this.

Like someone else already said. That's not how YouTube works. Those people dont show up in my feed.

And there are plenty of popular things I dont watch. I for example haven't seen the twilight movies either, but thats because they suck.

[sgreszcz]

16 hours ago, Germy1979 said:

If you've ever suffered 5 minutes of Youtube Kids, your "algorithm" statement is completely correct.  Watch Sonic the Hedgehog drive Lightning Mcqueen off a skyscraper 1500 feet onto a farting velociraptor with breasts and Don Johnson loafers...  while "Daddy Finger" repeats in the background. 

Yeah, this.  I can't believe that for some reason I thought youtube kids was curated.  How naive was I considering I work with data and algorithms (although for very dull purposes).  As soon as I started seeing weird stuff pop up in the "what to watch next" and read this article (about how the spammers game the algorithms) youtube was gone from anything my kids have access to.  Shame as there is potentially a lot of good educational content there (I've learned a lot about how to shoot video there), but impossible to filter.

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

From the article: 

"As someone who grew up on the internet, I credit it as one of the most important influences on who I am today. I had a computer with internet access in my bedroom from the age of 13. It gave me access to a lot of things which were totally inappropriate for a young teenager, but it was OK. The culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships which I consider to be central to my identity were shaped by the internet, in ways that I have always considered to be beneficial to me personally."

...

"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. "

8 hours ago, Christina Ava said:

us being born at internet BC and our kids being born with the internet as a "nanny" at internet A.D., my son doesn't watch tv. I have limited his access to youtube after the daddy finger crossover Dino crossover Lighting mcqueen autism inducing videos drive him insane as mentioned above. We filter the crazy, its sad that the next generations view these things as tame. Not at all shocking anymore

I've had to delete Youtube as have not had luck filtering within Youtube itself so have had to delete/block except for on my work machine and my and my wife's phones which are locked.  Too much weird crap that keeps popping up.  Any tips would be appreciated...

[norliss]

I'd never heard of this bloke until this recent controversy and have no intention of looking at any of his content, neither.

[Damphousse]

41 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

It is a little surprising and a little sad when I see so many comments like this.

Because we're all media creators here, yet we're totally unaware of one of the biggest media creators on the biggest media platform of them all?!

As Logan Paul was one of the biggest vloggers of 2017, his content has billions and billions and billions of views across all the platforms.

 

Quality over quantity, perhaps?

I'm fairly certain there are tons of Michelin Star chefs in France that have never heard of Papa Johns.

43 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Next people here will be telling me they don't know who PewDiePie or Jon Olsson are....

We are aware of who PewDiePie is.  After his antisemitic stuff Disney severed ties with him and the story popped up on my radar during the financial news.  Otherwise I would have never heard of him.

What I'm surprised by is the fact that you are not aware of the multidecade trend of society fragmenting.  Schools are more segregated now than they were in the 60s.

The only time I know what has been said on Fox and Friends is when the NY Times writes an article about it expressing their outrage.  I proudly admit to my complete ignorance of whatever Fox News is pushing at any given time.

My interest in video is as a hobby, for stock video sales, and perhaps in the future some professional corporate stuff as a side thing to my main line of work.  I have no idea how PewDiePie would fit into any of that.  Unless someone buys one of my stock videos and puts it up on youtube themselves none of the content I create will appear on youtube and none of it will ever be monetized utilizing the youtube model.

Bollywood is the most prolific movie creator in the world.  Second place historically has been Nigeria of all places.  And the United States in years past was third.  I couldn't name a single director, producer, or DP from the top two most prolific movie creating regions.  So, yeah... youtube jokers?  No, don't know any of them unless they really cock something up and earn the wrath of the elites.

[sgreszcz]

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

It is a little surprising and a little sad when I see so many comments like this.

Because we're all media creators here, yet we're totally unaware of one of the biggest media creators on the biggest media platform of them all?!

As Logan Paul was one of the biggest vloggers of 2017, his content has billions and billions and billions of views across all the platforms.

For all the obsession this forum has about Casey Neistat, he is small fry next to the Paul brothers.

Next people here will be telling me they don't know who PewDiePie or Jon Olsson are....

I guess I don't watch the right youtube (or enough) since I don't know who any of those people are except Casey Neistat.  Then again, I probably cannot name any "famous" person these days as I don't consume much popular culture.   I do watch a significant amount of video creation content and technical tutorials on youtube so as someone above said you get what you watch. 

The problem for me is not my own personal filter but the recommender algorithms being polluted by spambots and all sorts of weird shit being served up to kids who don't have the wisdom to filter.  Thus, all the informative content that I have access to is off limit to my kids (at least in my house and my control).  TV was bad enough with constant commercials pushing crap (never regretted my TV license fees to mostly avoid that minefield) but youtube is a continuous series of unboxing videos or commercials.  Once that and the weird stuff gets in front of young eyes and into the brain, thats it for good - no erase.

No way to filter except to turn it off.  Shame.  At least with the plain-old internet you can do a decent job using the right search engine, web filters, and DNS servers.

[Kisaha]

Since when Vlogging became an essential watch? I do not watch, or care, for vloggers, or whatever they called, but I am very well informed with media and social culture.

I have seen a few (3 or 4) Neistat videos, and a PewDiePie video of The Last of Us gameplay, just to see those persons. Never heard of the others mentioned here.

All these videos produced are just digital noise. Next (current) generations will have issues with their critical judgement. Like always, there will be millions of junk, and a few master pieces, PewDiePie WON'T be the Aristoteles of the 21st century.

The new Black Mirror season has a few episodes on those subject matters.

 

[Tim Sewell]

Quote

Says you?

Look, I'm not trying to say there is no morality or that Paul is not wrong. I'm saying that without a completely objective moral standard, there is no condemnation of another's actions, at least not a rationally sound one.

Firstly, Andrew posted an opinion piece so he wasn't really attempting to state any kind of universal truth except inasmuch as he sees it. But actually there is - at least across a fairly large portion of the world - a fairly accessible selection of objective moral standards. Loudmouth Breitbart commentators and presidents might try to subvert those standards in the minds of their gullible acolytes, but actually, most of the world agrees that you shouldn't kill or steal, that you should love, or at least respect your neighbour, that you should help those in trouble. These are basic human altruistic impulses that are codified into law in virtually every 'civilised' place on our planet.

Likewise I'd be surprised if - had you access to the world's population - you could rustle up anything more than a tiny minority who would agree that behaving with disrespect to the corpse of a man in such pain that he had to end his own life was anything other than despicable. So moral relativism may be a fun debating gambit but it actually falls over not just in the here and now, but across a pretty large portion of human history.

Some people like to say that the relative decline in the West of organised religion has led to a reduction in ethics and morality, but those phenomena existed long before any of the organised religions came on the scene and will far outlast them. An objective reality? Well everything is altered by our gaze upon it, but human values (not political ones, BTW) that are agreed on by the majority of my peers will do the job for me.

Quote

The guy is a total ass. But he should have that right to be an ass. We certainly have the right to ignore him. Censorship is a very, VERY dangerous thing and its potential for abuse is massive once you start approving ways to justify doing it.

Censorship is FAR more dangerous to society than this dick-head ever will be.

He does have the right to be an ass - we have the right to ignore him - as does YouTube, should they choose to. In certain countries people have an inalienable right to free speech within the bounds of the law, but I'm not aware of any constitution that says they also have a right to utilise a private company's platform to disseminate that speech. It would be censorship to lock the knob up for his unpleasantness, it wouldn't be censorship for YouTube to tell him to take it elsewhere.

[Hans Punk]

This all shows how detached people have become (often them pesky youngsters) on how much power the internet can yield and bite you in the ass when you get cocky. Dipshit kids will always exist - we actually need them, we all make mistakes and often learn valuable life lessons from young age and hopefully grow up to be better people. But when you have millions of followers that you know are mostly young and possibly impressionable, there should at least be a moral obligation to think about what you are putting out there for the kiddies to see. I think apologising afterwards because of the ‘backlash’ is a bit too late...it is often clear that the tears in the eyes are really caused by fear of their channel and revenue being cut off, not genuine remorse. Earning revenue from your apology video is a bit of a giveaway...that at least should be donated to a suicide prevention charity. YouTube should be held accountable up to a point (morally and sometimes legally), but the largest responsibility should rest on the shoulders of the content makers themselves. Imagine what wonderful content could exist if those who created were not purely infected with the monetary incentive of ‘likes’ and ‘subscribes’ and paid for promotion bullshit.

Putting cultural value or gauging fame on the amount of likes or subscribers someone has is like telling me how many people in the world ordered a Big Mac in one day...impressive stats if you want to represent McDonald’s at a fast food conference, but otherwise pointless. If you want to stop Gorden Ramsey spitting your lamb cutlets back in your face after you prepared a meal for him, you don’t cook up some frozen substandard shit that the masses seem to accept. You make something of worth and quality to impress...or don’t bother - and appeal to the suckers who can’t taste the difference.

Perhaps I’ve only seen crappy YouTube ‘stars’...they just all appear to be like self serving arrogant cocks who remind me exactly of the people I would not invite to my yacht for afternoon tea and scones.

YouTube stars ain’t ‘my bag’ so needless to say I have no cultural value associated with them at all...so this recent news sadly has no shock value for me, other than feel sorry for the video-bombed dead guy and his grieving family. It now seems that other YouTube stars are now condemning this guys actions...behold, the moral authority have spoken! We are truly living inside an episode of Black Mirror.

Disclaimer: I’ve never seen anything I’d class as entertainment on YouTube, other than Red Letter Media videos and the occasional live streaming from a house full of cats.

The only positive reminder from this whole debacle, no matter how much you care (or not) - is to post on your social media feed the number of your local suicide helpline/ Mental health outreach programme and share it with friends. There is a very good chance it will reach someone you care about and remind them that help is out there.

[PannySVHS]

Didnt know it was that bad with youtubers. piedeewee, this logan guy. good thing i don´t have to watch their stuff. bad thing, i might have to deal with people who do. piedee has a pushing way to make his point like Tv commentators on roids. That reckless TV people trend started in the 80ies and it has not stopped since then but instead has been perfectionized. The same will go for the web.

[silvertonesx24]

Algorithms are neither good nor bad they just are. Just don't watch the videos and they won't show up in your feed. "Modern culture is corrupting our children" is an argument as old as time.

Also, I find it hard to believe that 2/3 of people browse the web without adblocking. Block ads and they don't make money. It's as simple as that and far better than traditional interrupt advertisement. If you like them then whitelist them. uBlock is just common sense. You can't control other people but it isn't really that hard to control what you or your children watch.

[bwhitz]

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in content standards. Paul should be shunned, if nothing else, for being a talentless hack. And people should be shunned for watching garbage that people like him put out. I feel bad for the professional-media industry in general these days. I mean, this guy has made well-over 10 million jumping around like a asshat and talking about nonsense. There are girls that are multi-millionaires from fucking make-up tutorials. Who the hell is going to want to actually write and film real stories in the future?  

[Damphousse]

1 hour ago, silvertonesx24 said:

 "Modern culture is corrupting our children" is an argument as old as time.

So are community standards designed to mitigate those bad effects.  Or are we to believe you wish to go back to a world where Big Tobacco marketed cigarettes to kids?

India fumes as Big Tobacco targets young people in bid to recruit new smokers

From The American College of Pediatricians...

"Consumption of pornography is associated with many negative emotional, psychological, and physical health outcomes.  These include increased rates of depression, anxiety, acting out and violent behavior, younger age of sexual debut, sexual promiscuity, increased risk of teen pregnancy, and a distorted view of relationships between men and women."

Not really something a seven year old should be randomly exposed to while watching cartoons.  Never imagined that would be a controversial statement.

1 hour ago, bwhitz said:

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in content standards. Paul should be shunned, if nothing else, for being a talentless hack. And people should be shunned for watching garbage that people like him put out. I feel bad for the professional-media industry in general these days. I mean, this guy has made well-over 10 million jumping around like a asshat and talking about nonsense. There are girls that are multi-millionaires from fucking make-up tutorials. Who the hell is going to want to actually write and film real stories in the future?  

I actually think tutorials of all sorts are one of the best things about Youtube.  Make up tutorials might be useless for a guy like me but most people on the planet at some point would be interested in make up tips.  The business world is full of stuff like that.  A lot of the time people overlook very simple practical low key unmet needs in search of a fancy luxury.  It is amazing how much money one can make tapping into an unmet need with a mundane but well executed plan.  I've never watched Blue Collar Millionaires but I love the concept of the show.  It is kind of amusing reading this forum sometimes because we talk about 4k raw and 10 bit this and that.  Yet there are scores of people earning hundreds of thousands a year and sometimes millions with an old Canon DSLR and an 8 bit compressed codec.

Having said that the next great narrative writer or director is not going to be derailed making make up tutorials.  And make up tutorial girl is not going to pen the next Godfather trilogy.  Those people for the most part are in totally different buckets.

[fuzzynormal]

6 hours ago, IronFilm said:

yet we're totally unaware of one of the biggest media creators on the biggest media platform of them all?!

FWIW, I swim in a different pond on a totally different continent, so yeah. 

[silvertonesx24]

14 hours ago, Damphousse said:

So are community standards designed to mitigate those bad effects.  Or are we to believe you wish to go back to a world where Big Tobacco marketed cigarettes to kids?

India fumes as Big Tobacco targets young people in bid to recruit new smokers

From The American College of Pediatricians...

"Consumption of pornography is associated with many negative emotional, psychological, and physical health outcomes.  These include increased rates of depression, anxiety, acting out and violent behavior, younger age of sexual debut, sexual promiscuity, increased risk of teen pregnancy, and a distorted view of relationships between men and women."

Not really something a seven year old should be randomly exposed to while watching cartoons.  Never imagined that would be a controversial statement.

Here's an idea- teach your children to identify and resist manipulation in advertising (ironically the opposite of what I do for a living). Don't depend on the fucking iPad, television, Hollywood, Madison Ave, or the government to raise your kids unless you want them to become a case study for the american college of pediatricians.

As a fan of the obnoxious nostalgic nonsense that is 80s hair metal, it's funny watching the parallels between Twisted Sister, Poison, PMRC, and today with YouTubers. Same crap just different generation.