YouTube Severs Ties With Logan Paul After Controversial Video

When Logan Paul uploaded a video that showed the body of an apparent suicide victim, he told his viewers that he was making "YouTube history." Technically, that's true — just not the way he expected. The backlash to the video was swift and brutal, and while there were many complaints that YouTube took far too long to respond to the controversy, today they finally announced some pretty intense consequences for the creator.

According to USA Today, Paul has been dropped by Google Preferred, a system that helps popular channels find brand advertisers. He was also dropped from the YouTube Red series Foursome, as well as from the upcoming original movie The Thinning: New World Order.

"We expect more of the creators who build their community on @YouTube, as we’re sure you do too. The channel violated our community guidelines, we acted accordingly, and we are looking at further consequences," YouTube said in their original statement on Twitter on Tuesday. "It’s taken us a long time to respond, but we’ve been listening to everything you’ve been saying. We know that the actions of one creator can affect the entire community, so we’ll have more to share soon on steps we’re taking to ensure a video like this is never circulated again."

Foursome costar Jenn McAllister Tweeted on Wednesday "I can’t deal with yt right now what a joke."

Paul's last Tweet announced that he was taking a break from the platform.

"taking time to reflect no vlog for now see you soon"

This whole debacle has sparked an equal amount of criticism towards YouTube who allowed the video to go up in the first place. According to Polygon, Paul was the one who added an age-gate, and Paul was the one who took the video down. YouTube allegedly reviewed the video after it was flagged, but ultimately let it remain up, allowing it to reach number ten on trending.

The fact of the matter is, this video went up on December 31, taken down January 2, and took until today to result in any actual consequences. Is this a problem with Paul, who should have never uploaded the video in the first place? Is this a problem with YouTube, who should have immediately taken it down? Or is this a problem with society, who ultimately reward controversy with the clicks that sustain it? The answer, most likely, is all three, meaning we have our work for 2018 cut out for us if we want change.

Refinery29 has reached out to YouTube and Paul for comment.

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