Anyone can become famous and achieve their dreams in an age where YouTube can provide a platform for content, and it's not every day someone achieves the power and fanbase Logan and Jake Paul have amassed through both YouTube and Vine. There is a problem, though, when just anyone can become famous and powerful—the disrespectful and greedy can achieve this kind of power as well.

YouTube is Flawed

Let me begin by talking about YouTube first, as it's where the Paul brothers' fame and infamy first arose. It is a broken platform that favors quantity over quality, and I even proved this myself when I tested the YouTube algorithm and uploaded one video (most of which were 1-30 seconds) every day for all of summer 2016. It's from this that my channel boomed and gained a following that has since grown to 300 subscribers. It's not a large following, but it's telling of how YouTube puts channels like this in favorable places. While YouTube channels that friends of mine curate post infrequently, they post content that takes work and effort, unlike most of my offhand videos, and yet retain a subscriber-base of only 50 to150 subscribers, not even half of mine.

YouTube favored the Paul brothers' content ever since they began their channel because they post every day. On top of this, their titles are almost all in capital letters and their thumbnails made to look enticing despite them mostly just being video logs. Combine these techniques with their previous Vine stardom and there is a recipe for YouTube success, which obviously shows. It is through the power YouTube granted them in an enormous fan base and an easy way to monetize their fans that the Paul brothers began to become exceedingly greedy. This money-making scheme is no different from any other because it also involves a blatant disregard for human rights, and in the case of the Pauls specifically, a disregard for the human right of respect for others.

Jake Paul's Initial Showcase of the Paul Philosophy

In one smaller instance of greed, Jake Paul took a video driving uninvited to the house of famous rapper Austin Richard Post, known professionally as Post Malone, and posted it to YouTube. In this act, he revealed where Mr. Post lived and had no blurs or filters over any of the addresses in the video's initial posting. Not only did he do this, he even put up footage of a pantsless Post, who came to the door not expecting to be filmed, and even filmed Post from a car nearby during the encounter, an additional camera which Post was never told about. This blatant disrespect of Post's privacy did not go unnoticed and there was a backlash that caused Paul to blur some of the footage he took using YouTube's post-production editing software, which was not advanced enough to blur anything after the initial couple camera shots of Post's house. In addition to that act, Paul also illegally filmed himself walking to his next door neighbor's house without asking his neighbor's permission earlier in the same video, then even accused his neighbors of attempted murder. For a more in-depth look at Jake Paul's actions in his video with his neighbor and Post Malone, I highly suggest watching the dissection of it by h3h3Productions' Ethan and Hila Klein.

When asked about his actions later in a podcast with h3h3Productions, Paul responded, "There's really no excuse." Even with this thought in mind, though, Jake Paul still never removed the footage from his channel in respect of Mr. Post's privacy. Instead, during the same podcast, Paul excuses himself by saying, "I can't, bro. It's everyday, bro," despite the fact he had just said that there was no excuse for his actions. Obviously, Paul is keeping this disrespectful footage up because it is another opportunity to him, an opportunity to gain more traction, get more clicks and earn more money from those 12 million subscribers of his and from those browsing through YouTube's broken system. When it comes to blatantly valuing greed over basic human respect, Jake Paul has shown that for him it is most certainly "everyday, bro."

Logan Paul's Disgusting Disrespect

It was most recently, though, that the Paul brothers have shown their true colors in an act made by the elder of the two brothers, Logan Paul. During his trip to Japan, Logan was, understandably (don't want to lose any clicks or chances to monetize a moment, do we?) video logging his entire trip, treating this culturally thriving, wonderful place as nothing more than a playground he could have fun on and make a mockery of to his fans. In his video logs there, he annoys local people and is even thrown out of a shrine due to his buffoonery. He disrespects people and the Japanese culture to earn clicks and money in a much more extreme, but similar vein to his brother's escapade with Post Malone.

In a much more terrible instance of this behavior, Logan Paul went to Aokigahara, a forest where many people unfortunately take their lives, and, when he arrived, he found the body of a suicide victim. Logan Paul decided that this body, this person who had taken their own life, was footage he could post and monetize, doing nothing more in respect for that man than blurring the body, but still doing things such as getting closeups nearby. Of course (I say with the utmost sarcasm) that dead man's family, his friends and the culture he lives in wouldn't care if Logan Paul monetized him for clicks, traction and greed! Paul even put the man's body in his video's thumbnail to earn more clicks and get the most bang out of that body's buck, it seems. The blatant disrespect and greed on display quite literally makes my stomach churn in disgust. Paul used a suicide to promote his YouTube brand, and it wasn't until four million views had passed before the video was taken down. The fact that it was uploaded at all clearly shows how much Logan Paul values human respect and respect for the dead when there is money to be made in disregarding it.

Logan Paul not only disrespected a body with his actions in Japan, he has disrespected Japanese culture, and these actions will absolutely influence many Japanese peoples' opinions about foreigners because of the wide reach Paul has on YouTube and because of the negative coverage I'm sure Japanese news outlets will premier. These actions may make it much harder for people such as myself (as someone intending to study abroad and work in Japan) to integrate into their culture as a foreigner, and the problem Logan's actions will inevitably cause is best explained by Michael Sundman of Gaijin Goombah Media.

Conclusion

YouTube's algorithm-reliant system is similar to Google's because the amount of clicks something gets will determine what appears more frequently in user searches. If a channel uploads as often as possible, there will be more overall clicks for the channel, even if the individual videos are clicked on by the same people, resulting in that channel appearing on the site more frequently. Uploading every day in video logs in addition to retaining their Vine stardom, the Paul brothers were able to gain immense power over YouTube and began taking advantage of the monetization system so they could cash out on these many clicks. This fame wasn't for the better, though, because both brothers have, in order to greedily get the most money and clicks, disregarded basic human respect. Jake Paul has done so in one example where he violated the privacy of his neighbor and Post Malone, and so too has Logan Paul on a much more offensive and terrible scale during his trip to Japan. Because of flawed algorithms making people famous in our much more mechanized day and age where unfeeling robots are used in the place of human workers, people such as Jake and Logan Paul can become famous despite the low production quality of their videos, blatantly greedy tactics used, and disgusting amounts of disrespect they display.