YouTube, Morality, and Accountability

When YouTube was first founded back in 2005, it began as a small video-sharing website with the intent of spreading original, creative content. It may be fair to say that, at its core, YouTube is still the same 16 years on — a video-sharing website, with original, creative content being uploaded every second. Today, however, it stands as the most visited website in the US. Not only that, but making videos on YouTube is now considered a legitimate career path, and has been proven to be a lucrative choice for a number of people. Let’s talk about a few of them.

It would be fitting to start with Logan Paul, a former successful Viner turned very successful YouTuber. Back in 2017, on New Year’s Eve, he uploaded the infamous ‘Suicide Forest’ video. You won’t need details unless you’ve been living under a rock, but the skinny is that, during a trip to Japan’s Aokigahara forest, Paul discovered and filmed a hanging corpse, before uploading the footage to YouTube. Paul also filmed and uploaded extensive footage of his other less-than-savoury exploits in Japan, including throwing various objects at locals, and jumping onto a moving forklift.

Going into depth about why it was an appalling thing to do seems unnecessary at this point. After all, it was talked about extensively by pretty much everyone back at the start of 2018, and Paul was derided not just by us common folk, but by many big names on the platform itself, including Jenna Marbles and Daz Black. Eventually, YouTube itself went to some lengths to punish Paul, dropping him from Google Preferred, cutting him from the fourth season of the YouTube Red series Foursome and halting production on a number of his other projects. However, it came down to Paul himself to delete the video after it had been on the trending tab for hours, reaching 6 million views.

Of course, Paul still has a good amount of criticism being thrown his way for the incident, rightly so. However, he does have (as of writing this) 22.8 million subscribers, a successful clothing line, and still enjoys a good level of fame and wealth. His videos still receive millions of views. After only two weeks, YouTube restored ads to Paul’s channel, enabling him to monetise his videos once again. One of his projects that had originally been put on hold by YouTube, The Thinning: New World Order, was even released back in October of 2018. It seems his punishment, if it can be called that, was short-lived.

Morality on a platform like YouTube, on the internet in general, and how we should measure it and deal with it is an issue worth exploring. It’s particularly worth discussing in today’s world where the internet is everywhere, and where people like Logan Paul are the idols of today’s youth.

Needless to say, the issue doesn’t stop at Logan Paul. A more recent bout of controversies stem from Trisha Paytas, another YouTuber. She’s less prominent than Paul, with 4.9 million subscribers, but her name is certainly well-known. In 2019, Paytas uploaded a video claiming that she was transgender, a move that many claim was done for clicks. Even more recent, in March of 2020, she uploaded yet another video claiming to have Dissociative Identity Disorder, spreading misinformation and diagnosing herself without consulting medical professionals. Paytas then accused fellow YouTuber, DissociaDID, of faking her own disorder. Naturally, Paytas received a lot of criticism on both counts, but she faced no real consequences. Most of her videos still gain views in the hundreds of thousands.

Logan’s younger brother, Jake Paul, another Viner-turned-YouTuber, revels in his own notoriety. In 2017 he was fired from the Disney series Bizaardvark when his neighbours went public with complaints about his behaviour, and he was slapped with a class-action public nuisance lawsuit by the company that owned his home. He’s been accused of scamming his young fans through various subscription-based schemes and was even charged with trespassing in Arizona in June 2020, where he was filmed at a mall that had been looted and vandalised. In August 2020 the FBI even conducted an armed raid on his home, collecting guns from his property. As of right now, he has over 20 million subscribers, each of his videos receiving millions of views.

These aren’t just questions of morality, either. At the start of 2019, Romeo Lacoste, YouTuber and famous tattooist to the stars, was accused of grooming underage girls while in his 20s, all the way back in 2016. Numerous women came forward with their own stories and screenshots of messages between themselves and Lacoste. And we don’t need to take their word for it — he did an interview with fellow YouTuber Keemstar, wherein he admitted to knowing the girls were underage and tried to blame the incidents on struggling with his newfound fame. Lacoste has never been arrested or charged in relation to these accusations, and today, he’s still tattooing and running his YouTube channel. He has close to a million subscribers. His most recent video received 278,000 views.

Shane Dawson, however, is the subject of the most recent controversy on the platform. While Dawson is well-known for his past use of black-face and racial slurs, he also has a pretty lengthy history of inappropriate actions towards minors, mostly from his earlier videos. In one video, he discusses sex, in detail, with his underage cousin. In others, he tells one underage fan to ‘twerk’, forces a young boy to eat a penis-shaped biscuit, and pretends to masturbate to a poster of then-underage Willow Smith. In one episode of his podcast, he admits to Googling ‘naked babies’ and calls them ‘sexy’, before trying to justify paedophilia as a fetish.

Now, Dawson has made a number of videos over the years apologising for his behaviour. He’s claimed the allegations are nothing more than attempts at shock humour from his early career, taken out of context, and has since removed many of the problematic videos from his channel. No matter what he wants to call it, though, the wider implications here are concerning. Not only was Dawson not called out at the time for any of his content, by YouTube or his audience, he was YouTube’s biggest star for many, many years. This content, as offensive as it was, was also popular. It made money. Sure, Dawson’s channels were demonetised in July 2020 and he’s subsequently taken a break from the internet, but his channel is still sitting there with 20 million subscribers. He’s planning on making a comeback soon enough, and no doubt he will still garner millions of views when he does.

Then there are the smaller controversies from YouTubers like Nicole Arbour, with her slew of offensive videos targeted at certain groups of people, the most well-known being her ‘Dear Fat People’ video. She’s still making content and receiving thousands of views. Another YouTuber, RiceGum, who is notorious for his feuds with other content creators, uploaded a vlog from his time in Hong Kong where he asks various restaurants about ‘dog meat’ and generally acts inappropriately to the locals. He has 10.5 million subscribers and received millions of views on his videos even after the Hong Kong vlog. YouTubers like PewDiePie and iDubbbz, both with millions of their own subscribers, have casually said the n-word and made various, racially insensitive jokes. While these incidents may not make the same sensational headlines as the Paul or Dawson drama, they’re still indicative of a sense that YouTubers can say and do offensive things without worrying too much about the consequences.

Anyone on YouTube, even if they only have something like 1000 subscribers, has a platform that they should strive to do good things with. What is said and done, particularly when uploaded to the internet by influencers, has an impact and should be taken into careful consideration. Having such a platform is a privilege that not everyone will have the good fortune of ever receiving. After all, with great power comes great responsibility. So why aren’t YouTubers held accountable in any meaningful way?

It’s not an easy question, and the answer is somewhat layered. The CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, has stated, regarding Paul’s ‘Suicide Forest’ video, that he did not meet the criteria for being banned from the platform, that they cannot just remove people’s channels. I think we can all agree that lighting the torches and moving to cancel someone at the first sign of trouble is a bad way of going about things. But here, we’re talking about a number of people who have proven time and time again that they are careless with their influence.

In the past, YouTube have indeed removed channels from their website. One such channel belonged to Austin Jones, who, back in 2017, was arrested for (among other things) grooming underage girls. Initially, however, YouTube weren’t even going to remove his channel, since they believed his crimes weren’t closely related to his content. They only changed direction after he pled guilty and was subsequently convicted in 2019, and eventually, the channel was removed. So, if nothing else, it seems that a criminal conviction will push YouTube into action sooner or later.

But is it enough? In a world where regular, non-famous people are at risk of losing their jobs for infractions that end up going viral — as in the case of Amy Cooper and the Central Park video, where she falsely accused a black man of assault — why aren’t YouTubers themselves made to face harsher consequences? Now, Cooper absolutely deserved penalties for what she did — that’s not up for debate. Her firm stated publicly that they ‘do not tolerate racism of any kind’, and as such, she lost her job. A fair and acceptable punishment, it seems. There are plenty more examples in this Spiked article, and while some of the people on that list certainly do seem deserving of punishment, others certainly don’t. Meanwhile, YouTube constantly looks the other way while some of the site’s most viewed content pushes any number of boundaries.

Let’s be clear here. YouTube is a website, but it’s also a business — a business that makes a lot of money from the advertisements that you see throughout the videos you watch on there. The more views on a video, the more potential clicks on an advert. Considering the sheer amount of views Paul’s and Dawson’s content generates, it’s no wonder YouTube wants them to stick around, no matter how many times they seem to disgrace themselves.

We also have to take into account the kind of audience these YouTubers play to. The main demographic for both Paul brothers is made up of teens, on the older and younger end of the spectrum, and some even younger than that. When Dawson was at his peak in the late 2000s, his audience would have been within a similar range. Children are not only impressionable, they’re also less likely to grasp the gravity of any of the situations mentioned above. Even in the case of the ‘Suicide Forest’ video, fans of Paul were rushing to his defense and arguing that his apology was enough to right the situation. Add this to the sheer size of these subscriber counts and, even if a few thousand fans happen to unsubscribe, their fame is barely dented.

There’s a fair argument that holding YouTubers accountable for their offenses isn’t simply a matter of throwing them off the platform, because nothing would be gained or learned that way. With audiences like Paul’s and Dawson’s, they don’t particularly need YouTube to keep their heads above water anyway. But then it becomes a matter of how we do hold them accountable, how we decide on fitting consequences and what kinds of things should be considered punishable. One person’s offensive act is another person’s dark humour — so where do we draw the line?

Of course, there are many non-famous, non-rich people who think, do and say questionable or outright offensive things without consequence all the time. The difference is that they do not have an audience of thousands, millions, who look up to them as a role model. Paul, Dawson, and perhaps even Paytas, do. Even if nobody explicitly admires them as individuals, their videos are still watched by scores of people, many of them young and vulnerable to what they see online. Having any audience comes with a responsibility to be aware of that audience, and similarly, to be aware of exactly what you’re putting out into the world.

Holding YouTubers accountable, then, seems to be a responsibility that should fall on them rather than anyone else. After all, Paul is 25 years old at the time of writing (22 at the time of the ‘Suicide Forest’ video). Dawson is 32 years old, and would have been in his early 20s during his peak. Paytas is 32. These people are not children making mistakes. They are adults, who should be wholly aware of the influence they hold and most of all, care about it.

And, in an ideal world, they would care. But the point of this entire article is to prove that some of them don’tcare. While that argument about not throwing YouTubers off the platform is still a fair one, taking away the pedestals that these people stand on also seems fair. Why shouldn’t the likes of Paul, Dawson and Paytas lose their platforms? Why do we continue to idolise and enable people who make bad choices, over and over and over again?

A platform is a privilege. YouTube’s appeal, as well as its problem, is that the chance to have such a huge platform is at the fingertips of pretty much any Tom, Dick or Harry that, if the above examples are anything to go by, won’t understand or care what that entails. Don’t get me wrong — there are plenty of Toms, Dicks and Harrys out there that use their platforms to share creative, engaging content, but when it comes to YouTube, they’ve often been pushed aside in favour of figureheads like Shane Dawson.

Now, some of the names I’ve mentioned here don’t warrant being de-platformed, despite their mistakes. Clearly, the cases mentioned in this article are on a spectrum. The likes of Shane Dawson, the Paul brothers, and Romeo Lacoste are not really comparable to someone like PewDiePie. And, of course, de-platforming shouldn’t be considered lightly. The rug shouldn’t be pulled out from underneath anyone for one tasteless joke, or a slip of the tongue. Giving people, particularly influencers, room to learn and grow is important. But patterns of harmful behaviour that are well-documented should not be ignored as they have been.

The onus here is on YouTube itself to enforce stricter policies and harsher punishments on the bigger names on their site, so that the next generation of YouTubers aren’t even wilder caricatures of those that came before them. It needs to at least appear as if someone at YouTube HQ cares.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather Logan Paul not continue to enjoy his YouTube platform after such blatant disrespect towards a fellow human being. I’d rather Shane Dawson not be able to make a successful comeback after such debased and legitimately concerning behaviour came to light. I’d rather Romeo Lacoste be in jail, not on YouTube. But the burden of change remains on YouTube’s shoulders. Whether or not they’ll come through will remain to be seen.