Today in History: Controversial YouTube star Logan Paul was born
Logan Paul rose to fame through the short film sharing app, Vine, and has since gone on to become a somewhat controversial star on various social media platforms.
Born in Westlake, Ohio, USA, on this day in 1995, Logan Paul is an internet sensation whose claim to fame is his at times controversial short films across various platforms.
Paul first gained prominence by creating internet videos for a YouTube channel called Zoosh when he was 10 years old.
He dropped out of college in 2014 to pursue a full-time career as a social media influencer. His rise to fame came at the hands of the video snippet sharing app, Vine, when he was ranked as the 10th most influential person on Vine.
Paul has since migrated to YouTube where he has gained over 15 million followers on his personal vlog channel.
He has made appearances in a few television series including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Weird Loners.
Undoubtedly the greatest controversy he has found himself embroiled in occurred in 2017.
On 31 December, Paul uploaded a video to his YouTube channel depicting the corpse of a man who had committed suicide by hanging in Aokigahara at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan.
It was initially intended to be Part 3 of his “Tokyo Adventures” series, for which Paul and his group had planned to camp in the woods, but after finding the corpse, they decided to notify the authorities and cancel their plans.
The video amassed 6,3 million views within 24 hours of being uploaded.
Paul was criticised by numerous celebrities and politicians for posting the video, and was accused by other members of the YouTube community of being insensitive to suicide victims.
Several petitions began on Change.org, urging YouTube to delete Paul’s channel. The largest of these accumulated more than 500 000 signatures as of 12 January, 2018.
As a result of the backlash, Paul removed the video from his YouTube channel, and followed up with a written apology on Twitter on January 1, 2018.
On 2 January, another video apology was released to YouTube in which Paul describes his behaviour as a “coping mechanism,” and asking his fans to stop defending his actions in the process.
On February 4, Logan Paul officially returned to his daily vlogs on YouTube after a month-long hiatus.
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