With only a few days in the new year, Logan Paul has set the standard for how to be a click bait YouTuber who lacks an ounce of empathy. Known for his reckless urge to film and share the real and (maybe scripted) portion of his life, Paul has finally reached his goal of breaking the internet.

Recently, Paul uploaded a video to YouTube where he explores the Aokigahara Forest, which is known as Japan's "suicide forest." In the video, he appears to stumble across a dead body hanging from a tree and instead of finding help for the unfortunate individual he decides to vlog it.

He says out loud, "Yo are you alive?" and then while laughing continues with "Are you f*****g with us?" Not only is the tragic ending of someone's life exposed in all of this, but loved ones are forced to see someone laughing and mocking the severity of a situation.

As expected from any decent human being, there was a huge uproar over this video, which gained six million views before Paul decided to remove it. Upon removing the video, he uploaded an apology video and expressed in writing on Twitter how his intentions were poorly thought out.

If the intention was to bring awareness to suicide prevention, this stunt did nothing to help.

When is it ever too much?

Like many other YouTubers, the severity of a situation is never taken seriously and that is how people get hurt. Whether it is removing stop signs for some unamusing prank or accidentally shooting your boyfriend and facing prison, none of these stunts are worth a few clicks. Situations like these bring a healthy conversation on what is and are not acceptable for monetization.

In Paul's video, the body of the individual can be seen, but his face is blurred out. Paul's suicide video was not removed by YouTube, but instead himself based on all of the backlashes he received. Now, if any video is uploaded showing the full scene it is immediately removed. This may sound good, but still, the video of Paul's trip is on YouTube and being used as a reaction clip and for other purposes.

Based on their community guidelines, videos that block the whole entire video can remain uploaded. For now, we can only hope the loved ones of this individual are not severely damaged based off of the need for a few social media impressions.

How will YouTube handle this and future situations?

Based on current company rules, YouTube is not able to fully remove this disaster from their site. There are people reacting to the video, blocking the image, and reuploading after being deleted multiple times. As of now, YouTube cannot do anything to change this. Once a video is uploaded, people quickly capture it and if it contains inappropriate visuals it can easily be reuploaded with the images blocked out. For the people hurt in these situations, the video lives on forever. The only thing that can come is a new update to YouTube's policies.
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