2018: DOA

  I didn't think it needed to be said outright that filming a suicide victim's lifeless body and uploading the footage to YouTube is a disgusting, depraved, insensitive and utterly mindless thing to do but... well, here we are.

  Logan Paul, the former slightly less cunty one of the Paul brothers took the trophy from his younger sibling on New Years Eve when he uploaded 'We found a dead body in the Japanese suicide forest...' to the website. The forest being referred to is of course Aokigahara, national forest of Fujiawaguchiko, where more than a hundred people a year go to check out.

  Within the first day, the video garnered six million views and 460,000 likes before it was removed by Logan himself. It's safe to say the footage should've never existed in the first place, let alone been uploaded to a channel with a subscriber base of fifteen million - the majority of which is made up of kids between the ages of roughly nine and sixteen. In the video, the victim's face is blurred, but it can clearly be seen that he is hanging from a tree and his hands are purple. Logan and his gang of unsympathetic mutants can be seen joking and making offhand comments throughout.

  Apparently Logan's objective when visiting the forest was to make a video about suicide awareness, and if that's true, he got more than he bargained for and is currently dealing with the deserved repercussions. Unfortunately, the family duo are known for their lies and system cheats to rake in the views, thus increasing the ad revenue received. Going by the facts we know already, who knows if this reasoning is even the truth.

  Logan uploaded an apology, (I say that lightly), to his Twitter last night in which he basically apologised for all the aspects that affect him and him alone. He isn't sorry for what he did, he's sorry that what he did has had such an adverse affect on him. He doesn't mention the family, the victim, suicide prevention, or show any signs of remorse at all for what he's done.

  This situation further highlights the fact that YouTube's system is currently broken. Content creators are still being demonetised for something as menial as swearing when there was literally footage of somebody's corpse that managed to slip through the cracks. It doesn't surprise me as much as it concerns me considering the Paul brothers are basically YouTube's new poster boys, (PewDiePie who?) but fuck me, you'd think there'd be some type of cap on that kind of content.

  I daresay that this event will be swept under the rug after a week or so, once everybody gets bored, then the rest of 2018 can follow this particular car-crash accordingly. Could we really have expected a start less problematic than this? It's nice to dream about, I suppose.

  The video of course has since been re-uploaded so there's no forgetting what Logan did, but I'm not going to link it for obvious reasons.

  Instead I will be linking Logan's original apology, (literally just those screenshots), and a suicide prevention hotline. Not all of us take suicide and depression as lightly as Logan Paul, and I can assure you there is help out there. Having the correct sources is half the battle.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Logan Paul's Twitter Apology

Samaritans Suicide Prevention Helpline

Signed,
Elijah.
Meta Sentience.
02/01/2018