Logan Paul, an American vlogger, recently released a video of him and a few others visiting Aokigahara, known commonly as "suicide forest" in Japan. In addition to its scenic elements, the forest is well known for people that come every year to commit suicide. Logan found the body of a dead person who hanged himself and continued to film the body. Logan then posted the video on Youtube.
With 6 million views in less than 24 hours, this video has received an immense amount of controversy and Logan himself has started to receive harsh criticism from many people and celebrities. This prompted him to create two apologies for all social media platforms. I have a hard time accepting his apology for many reasons.
If you watched the video, you can see that as soon as Logan discovers that the person is dead, he continues to zoom in on the body. "Yo? Are you alive?" Logan asked the man. "Are you f-cking with us?" Instead of putting the camera down or cutting the dead body out of the video, he used this to promote suicide awareness.
I find it disturbing that he thought that showing a real-life suicide was an effective way to promote suicide awareness. The victim's family has already had to deal with the fact they lost a loved one, and now it's all over the internet for everyone to see. It's hard to imagine what the family must be going through.
In the video apology, Logan said, "I should have never posted the video. I should have put the cameras down, stopped recording what we were going through." Before he posts a video on Youtube, he has to edit it, which could take several hours, and still posted the video.
There was plenty of time for him to consider the fact that the video was unethical. He had every intention of putting it on the internet until he received thousands of negative comments.
Someone who has millions of followers on all social media platforms should understand the massive influence they have on the internet. Logan said, "I love everyone. I believe in people. I'm out here. Peace. #Logang."
Although he was trying to apologize, he was still promoting himself and his fan base, hoping they would back him up for his mistake. We're all aware that this will blow over when the next big story takes place, but his actions aren't forgivable. For the victims' sake, I would hope that there are consequences for his actions.
