Opinion

YouTube Has No Plans to Ban Logan Paul

YouTube

According to YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, Logan Paul doesn’t deserve to be banned for making offensive content.

“He hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes. We can’t just be pulling people off our platform. They need to violate a policy. We need to have consistent [rules].”

While YouTube is hesitant to ban Paul, his actions have caused the company to update its policies so that it can act faster as similar situations arise in the future. YouTube has also punished Paul by temporarily removing his ability to monetize his videos, and have placed age gate restrictions on some of his videos.

Of course the excuse is to appeal to some vague and useless notion of cultural or political difference as to what is “offensive”.

“What you think is tasteless is not necessarily what someone else would think is tasteless,” Wojcicki said.

In other words, “we don’t want to admit that certain things shouldn’t be OK, and we don’t want to take a moral stance that might compromise our money-making in any way.”

I’m pretty sure the vast majority of your users find animal cruelty and  exterimist content promoting Fascism to be fairly offensive Susan. Yet here we are, with you defending the rights of those idiots to spread their “message”. Just for the sake of clarity, I’m not calling Paul a Fascist, but YouTube’s slap on the wrist for guys like him is emblematic of a larger problem concerning more dangerous content like political extremism.

Logan Paul is making millions off of his content, and the brands that it helped launch, of course YouTube has a vested interest in protecting their revenue sources. But at what costs are they allowing this behavior to continue? People will continue to abuse the good graces of the platform as long as it continues to grant them money and fame.

As I pointed out previously, there’s a core problem with YouTube and its rules as they are enforced. That problem is that YouTube refuses to disallow extremely offensive content and creators because the site can still make money on it. The indirect monetization of offensive content relies on the recommendations system, and the design of that system is predicated on keeping people glued to YouTube. So even if it’s Logan Paul filming a dead body, or a neo-Nazi promoting genocide – and even if those clearly violate moral and legal standards for decency – YouTube won’t ban them.

The “marketplace of ideas” strikes again to enable the spread of more worthless and dangerous content on the internet.

YouTube either fails to realize, or intentionally ignores, the power it has as a dominant platform. And this issue isn’t unique to them. Reddit, Twitter and a host of other popular tech companies struggle with how to actually prevent the spread of offensive or subversive content.

Although it seems simple, BAN THOSE MAKING OFFENSIVE CONTENT FOR MONETARY OR IDEOLOGICAL GAIN, these companies are committed to preserving some perverted sense of entitlement to “free speech”. Even if that gets taken advantage of by the likes of Fascists and religious extremists. Just to be clear, this isn’t a call for blanket removal of all discussion of offensive topics. The sharing of ideas is important. But it’s clear guys like Logan Paul and Richard Spencer aren’t in this to empower a thorough and nuanced examination of systemic issues. They want power and money, and the internet is giving it to them.

Of course, an actual shift in policy for these companies would mean shifts in enforcement as well. And it’s blatantly obvious that algorithms cannot replace human judgment on whether or not to ban a questionable account. This means that these companies have a choice to make. They can either spend the effort and money on cleaning up their platforms, or they can prioritize profit by continuing to allow this kind of behavior.

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ISKMogul is a growing video game publication that got its start covering EVE Online, and has since expanded to cover a large number of topics and niches within the purview of gaming.
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