After recording and uploading a controversial video of his trip to Japan, Logan Paul returns to YouTube with the intent to spread suicide awareness and regain his status.

As a part of his three part series of his trip to Tokyo, Paul uploaded a video of him and a group of friends visiting the Aokigahara Forest, also known as the Suicide Forest. Suicide is very prevalent in Japan, and the forest has become a popular destination for those to commit suicide. In the video Paul is making jokes and trying to contain his laugh around the sight of a person’s body hanging by a tree.

Additionally, he went around the streets of Japan screaming while wearing traditional Japanese clothing and dressed up in a Pikachu onesie while throwing a plush pokeball at random civilians as a play on the Pokemon Go app game. There is, also, a scene of him buying a gameboy from a store and purposely throwing it onto the ground followed by him bringing it in saying that something must’ve happened to it to the cashier.

Mr. Smith, who teaches Sociology, believed that Paul’s channel runs on the amount of views and likes he gets per video. His understanding is that his target audience are older children to younger teenagers and thinks that “in showing the dead body, Logan was trying to present something with “shock value” to his viewers in order to gain more like/views/followers. In the process, he grossly offended the people of Japan. While this is something that might not register with his young audience, it is absolutely something someone in his position should have been cognizant of.”

His inappropriate reaction and additional actions around Japan has stirred lots of backlash within the YouTube community, with many commenters wishing for him to leave YouTube and never come back. Since then, he has followed with an apology video and emphasizing his intentions and purpose was to just spread awareness for suicide.

Katherine Canter, a senior, also shared the same opinion of commenters stating, “his actions were definitely not that of someone trying to spread suicide awareness. To raise awareness, he should have gone without the camera and then later talked to his viewers about what he saw and what it means, without making jokes. Instead, he exploited those people and their pain for views.”

It took about two weeks for YouTube to give a statement in regards to Paul’s video and has since then “pulled him from the Google Preferred program, a lucrative advertising network for certain YouTube channels that results in members having more favorable ad rates, and dropped him from the fourth season of YouTube Red series Foursome. His participation in the upcoming YouTube original film Thinning: New World Order, a sequel to another of his YouTube Red projects, has been put on hold,” according to Forbes. This, however, has still not pleased the YouTube community and a petition for YouTube to remove his channel has garnered over 500,000 signatures.

His return to YouTube continues to be negatively viewed and the faith of his channel from YouTube is still a continuing conversation. Mr. Smith added on that “while it is nice to see him take ownership of his actions, it can’t help but come off as reactionary. I believe that the only thing that will tell if he is truly sincere in his apology is time.”