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Has social media created too much freedom?
Thursday 11th January 2018 | Grace
We are lucky enough to live in a time and place where we can pretty much say what we want and do what we want to an extent. But in an age of social media, a platform that allows people to post homemade videos, write statements about their feelings to share with the world and to contact their favourite celebrity in the desperate hope of a response, are we as individual producers of content, given too much power?
What we're primarily referring to here is the recent story of Logan Paul, a 22-year-old YouTube vlogger who, on new year's eve, posted a video of himself in Japan discovering a dead body in Japan’s infamous suicide forest. It is not the fact that he happened to stumble into the body, or even that he went into the forest, it is what he did with the video and the following actions that have lead to the questioning of his power considering, especially considering the number of followers he has on YouTube.
The fact is, instead of not posting the video and out of respect, he did post the video of the body he found in Japan (with a blurred out face) and continued to make videos of himself running around the country, playing tricks on his friends and disrespecting the culture by doing things like pulling down his trousers on a crowded street and pretending to catch locals in a Pokémon ball.
To make matters worse, despite the video being taken down 24 hours after it was posted, Paul and YouTube have both made a huge profit from the film. Around £66,000 it is thought. The vlogger has apologised for the videos of his time in Japan but this is not the first time and in this ever-expanding age that somebody will take advantage of their social media presence.
Freedom is one of the best things we have, let’s not take advantage of it so much that because of dick wizards like Logan Paul, who doesn’t seem to understand the simple concept of respect, we don’t have it anymore.
