Logan Paul is an American famous YouTuber with 15 million plus subscribers. His videos, a relentless barrage of boasts, pranks, and stunts, have garnered him legions of adoring fans. One of his video went too far and made a blistering wave of criticism.
In 2017, he went to Japan with his team to make a video that makes the whole Japan angry. His has made a lot of disrespect, childish, irrational actions in Japan. Why? A Japanese YouTuber , That Japanese Man Yuta will explain you about his irrational and disrespectful actions about Logan Paul and his team in Japan (Source from That Japanese Man Yuta).
Most Japanese think Logan’s doing in Japan is unacceptable and childish.These are the Japanese reacts about Logan Paul’s vlog in Japan (Source form Asian Boss).
The conflict between groups in social media
There are two groups of people about Logan Paul. One is against Logan Paul to continue his YouTube channel and other is wanting to forgive what Logan’s wrongdoing about his terrible mistakes. There is debate with hashtags #CancelLoganPaul and #ForgiveLoganPaul . Vote here and see the results.
According to Yam (2018), a Change.org petition entitled “Delete Logan Paul’s YouTube Channel,” has garnered more than 190,000 signature. Multiple petitions call for YouTube to ban Paul form the platform, citing the vlogger’s disrespect of Japan and its culture and the trivial way suicide was discussed in the video. One of the petition stated:
“A man who had family and friends chose to end his life, and you choose to share his death to your millions of followers without thinking about how his family/friends felt? It’s disgusting and shouldn’t be tolerated.”
Even celebrities have chimed in to underscore how insensitive the vlogger’s behavior was, including fellow YouTuber Anna Akana, whose sister died by suicide.
YouTube announced it was dropping Paul from its Google Preferred premium advertising program in response to the outcry from Aokigahara forest video, and suspending its original content projects with him. After he deleted the video, he made an apology video about his actions in Japan following up with a written apology on Twitter, describing the video as a “severe and continuous lapse in my judgment”, and has since announced he is taking a break from vlogging to take “time to reflect”. However, Paul’s popularity gained more 400,000 subscribers since the contentious clip was released, according to Social Blade (Molloy 2018).
According to Blumenthal (2018), since the original video of Paul’s trip to a Japanese forest known for suicide was pulled by Paul, his fan group Logang has taken to the star’s Twitter, Instagram and YouTube channel to defend Paul or offer support with a hashtag #Logang4life.
Besides that, his apology video was ranked number one on YouTube trending videos page which 51.5 million views. There were 375,000 comments on the apology video posed to YouTube and 23,000 on the Twitter apology. His fans have continued to flock to his defense, filling up the comments on both posts with support and defending him to others.
While acknowledging his actions as irresponsible, he denied that his intention was to mock the victim. Although his true intention of making the video of Japanese suicide is to rise the awareness of mental health is great, but the way he filming it is not respect the suicide victim and his love ones.
Mental health is an issue faced in our modern society and we need to take it seriously about it.
If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also test HELLO to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the Crisis Text Line. Outside of the U.S, please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.