Students Not Impressed With Logan Paul

Allison Reid, News Editor

Over the weekend of December 31, a video shocked the entire social media spectrum. Logan Paul, a well-known vlogger and YouTuber with more than 16 million subscribers, posted a video featuring the censored body of a dead, hanging teenage boy.

Logan Paul, his brother Jake Paul, and several other members of their crew were on a trip in Japan in a feature done for their vlogs. During this trip, the team visited Aokigahara, a forest in the country, known globally as the “suicide forest” because of the mass number of suicide, overwhelmingly by youth, which take place there. In the vlog, Paul and his crew come across the hanging, dead body of a young boy.

“Suicide is not a joke,” Paul said in the video. “Depression and mental illness are not a joke. We came here with an intent to focus on the ‘haunted’ aspect of the forest. This obviously just became very real, and obviously a lotta people are going through a lotta s*** in their lives.”

However, after the video was entitled “WE FOUND A DEAD BODY!!! **emotional**”, it became questionable for the social media community as to how serious Logan Paul really was about mental health awareness and suicide prevention.

The outrage in response to the video has blown up immensely, and many students here are expressing their anger with Paul. “I am disgusted. I am revolted. I dedicate my entire life to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and this is the thanks I get,” said junior Ekaterini Bliznoff. “I guess I really just don’t understand why someone would post something like that, especially with all these kids worshipping his every move.”

The video was up for just over 24-hours before Paul himself removed it from YouTube, but it had more than 6.3 million views and was featured on the trending page for several hours. Many are attacking YouTube, stating that the site itself should have taken action because of the video’s abuse against its guidelines.

“I think he should be taken off of YouTube altogether,” former CHS teacher and YouTuber Tyler Adelsberger.

This opinion isn’t represented through all CHS students, however. Twitter (where majority of news of the video was spread) and YouTube are not sites frequently visited by all, so a number of students had no real knowledge of the event.

“I really didn’t pay attention to it, and I really don’t have an opinion,” said junior Bryce Ginder.

Reposts of Paul’s surfaced around YouTube after the original had been deleted, but these reposts have since been removed by the site.

Though Paul has not been removed from YouTube, the company removed him from the Google Preferred program, a “lucrative advertising network for certain YouTube channels that results in members having more favorable ad rates”, and kicked him from the latest season of  the YouTube Red series Foursome. Another film in sequel to another of his YouTube Red works has been put on hiatus.