Limiting YouTube Content Doesn't Function Like this, Vanity Fair

Logan Paul, a YouTube superstar with a whopping 12-15 million followers, found him self in water earlier this week for making light of suicide victims. This individual filmed one such person in Japan's "suicide woods, " where he performed a "stand-up comedy routine" next to a body. He retracted the online video after the backlash, and posted an apology online video (with 16. 2 mil views, his 16th most popular), titled "So remorseful. "

While most experts talked about the obvious, that Paul is an fool and it's regrettable that YouTube pays him to be one, Vanity Great columnist Richard Lawson got it a step past an acceptable limit. Are bros taking over the web? Well, watching any of the Paul brothers' videos, you might be inclined to feel that... Yet you can also get all those Fascista dweebs and men's-rights toads racking up views and swaying people to their terrible causes, and I actually wouldn't exactly call them bros. We should still resist most bro culture where we can, absolutely. But it's only one head of the hydra.

The hydra, Lawson moves on to explain, is a product or service of YouTube's bonus structure, whereby content designers are paid for high traffic and a high number of subscribers, whatever the quality of the content. As this allows an infinite number of Logan Pauls to emerge after the current one comes, attacking the one ranking today is an useless strategy.

While he's right that Paul's video could have been avoided if the incentive structure considered quality rather than just reputation, he's missing the point by claiming it took place because we as a society did not eliminate "bro culture" altogether. In fact, throughout the entire piece he offers no strategy to the YouTube hydra apart from killing heads with which he disagrees. This individual seems to see him self as a cultural guard, protecting us from coverage to morons like Paul, Nazi dweebs, and men's-rights toads on an not regulated Cormac McCarthy-esque wasteland.

However herein lies the challenge with the Lawson solution: She has transparently only intending to protect us from issues he thinks are dangerous. Would he support a YouTube ban on generous videos? Would he criticize YouTube for deleting videos of Trump speeches? Will he support banning all idiots? The response to all three appears to be no, given a laudable part Lawson wrote in 2016 about the YouTube workings of Paul's female equal, GloZell. She is known for three things: Using green lipstick, attempting to eat an entire spoon of cinnamon in 2012, and interviewing President Barack Obama in 2015. She is the meaning of a YouTube idiot, but Lawson is a rare lover.

In 2016, she confused for Hillary Clinton, and Lawson himself celebrated her use of YouTube to talk to millennial arrêters. Yes, YouTube is mistaken, but let's stay centered: Its failure is that it pays idiots to be idiots. If you want to rein in an idiot you detest, you must clarify why your preferred idiots should have to be exempted from the rule.