Cancel Culture

Concerning CANCEL Culture

By Julian Guerrero

Within the past ten years, popular culture has been heavily affected by the rapid expansion of media across all forms. The non-stop media consumption has slowly escalated to the point where our devices even tell us our weekly usage. With the media-centered popular culture in place, one particular media platform gave many an outlet to reach millions while expressing their creativity - YouTube. YouTube is defined as a “video-sharing service” but is much much more than that. With an audience of all ages, there are videos for practically anyone/thing. The monetization of particular YouTuber’s videos is largely credited to the advertisements YouTube shows before your video plays. Creators are paid based on the amount of views their videos receive. This gives creators the incentive to cultivate their followers in order to keep their views and money consistent. As of recently, a new trend has emerged amongst these social media superstars. “Cancel culture” is a new pattern originating from controversies experienced across YouTube. The proximity of YouTube’s communities makes it easier for the rapid spread of rumors or gossip. Therefore, cancel culture sees the bandwagon effect take place, where subscribers claim a creator is “cancelled” and unsubscribe just because others are unsubscribing and claiming they’re “cancelled.” Clearly this can be horrendous for a YouTuber, whose main monetization comes from the amount of views produced. Two young YouTubers by the names of Logan Paul and James Charles have their own individual experiences to contribute to the study of this cancel culture dating back to 2017. The year 2017 saw the meteoric rise of one of YouTube’s biggest names, Logan Paul. This former Viner was one of YouTube’s fastest creators to reach 10 million subscribers. His channel was also largely aimed towards a very young audience, in relation to his high-energy videos. That being said, there was usually not much explicit content posted by Logan. However, his trip to Japan was the biggest turning point in his career. Logan landed in Japan and was instantly all over the media. While there in Japan, Logan thought it’d be best to take this opportunity to make some videos ‘on theme.’ The video even reached YouTube’s trending page at #10. This allowed a wider audience to see it and weigh in on the video. By the next day, Logan had removed the video from YouTube and this story was flooding the media. The amount of backlash from this video sent Logan into hiding, even as YouTube cut ties with him. Six months later, Logan released a video apologizing for the incident, explaining how he had made some serious changes. His channel then went through a complete rebranding with the help of British YouTuber KSI (26 million subscribers). Logan arranged a professional boxing match with KSI, emerged back into the spotlight, and put this controversy to rest. He released one showing him racing through the streets as Super Mario, then a video focused around Pokemon. During these videos, Paul was largely seen as being disrespectful to Japan’s people and culture. But it was his next video that changed his YouTube experience.

Logan decided to take a trip to a local forest in Japan, Aokigahara, known as a place where many suicides have occurred. Accompanied by his crew, they headed off into the forest in search of some content. Two minutes later, they stumbled across a dead body. Him and his team took the moment to joke around about it and even filmed up-close footage of the body. Now, the body was blurred for a majority of the video, but can still be seen in different shots. The video ran its usual number of views and then some. She even took some old tweets from Charles that supported her story even though they were highly out of context and outdated. The YouTube beauty community exploded. Everyone who was anyone was talking about it and even making videos over the matter. The video had reached nearly 40 million views. In the days following Westbrook’s video, everyone seemed to have made up their mind right away. Charles was losing thousands of subscribers by the hour. The almighty PewDiePie (the only YouTuber with 100 million subscribers) even weighed in on the situation and just presented this drama to his even wider platform. James Charles experienced the biggest scandal of his career and perhaps even the year 2019 in total. As one of YouTube’s biggest makeup channels, as well as one of the youngest mega-stars, there was no questioning why all the heat was on Charles. Another beauty YouTuber by the name of Tati Westbrook released a video essentially slandering Charles. This 40-minute video was a premeditated rant on her relationship with Charles. She shared “personal experiences” with Charles where he made her uncomfortable. Westbrook claimed Charles would try to pressure heterosexual boys into liking him, as if trying to convert them somehow. Westbrook included screenshots of conversations over text with a waiter from one of her stories about Charles exhibiting this behavior. This had a major effect on the reach of the controversy. People who had no clue about Charles suddenly knew all about him and his private life. Charles was “cancelled” in headlines all over the media. A couple of days after the initial release, Charles released his own video in response to Westbrook. His video went in depth to stop the false claims Westbrook presented. All of a sudden, Charles was “cancelled” no more. His subscriber and follower count returned to its typical increasing trend, and all this drama quickly dissipated. The focus of this controversy was the haste Charles’ audience had when deciding who was in the wrong without his response, just going to show this new “cancel culture” created. Audience members are constantly monitoring YouTubers, watching them everyday! Any slipup from them and their whole career they’ve spent years making can all be gone in an instant. The manner in which Charles handled this situation explains why his follower count is higher than ever. These two YouTubers were able to recover from these scandals because they already had enough time to establish themselves. This made it possible for Logan and Charles to respond with the help of a team. Smaller YouTubers are not in the position to respond or frankly don’t have enough resources. Recently, a YouTuber by the name of Carl Riemers was the subject of a giant controversy and was not able to smooth things out as well as Paul and Charles. SoaR Carl is the name of Riemer’s channel where he is constantly streaming a variety of RNG games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, and others. One night, Riemers got a little too tipsy on his live stream and accidentally fired off his handgun. His gun was laying there on the desk where he was gaming and he shot it, thinking there were no rounds in the clip. Luckily, neither he nor his numerous pets were hurt, but one of his PC monitors fell as collateral. He showed detailed footage of where the bullet traveled, straight through a stainless steel traveler mug, a carton of his sponsor GFUEL, and into his several hundred dollar PC monitor.

Photos by Catalina Garcia

The bullet easily could have richoted in his direction or even towards one of his pets. As a result of his actions, Reimers was stripped of his membership with popular Esports team SoaR. He then went to YouTube and apologized for his actions. Shortly after, he was banned from streaming on not just YouTube but Twitch as well. Since Reimers was not a big enough entity and his main source of revenue being streaming, his entire career was destroyed. His overall misery and despair portrayed in his apology video truly showed the magnitude of how bad his mistake was in exchange for his dream job. Other social media creators and celebrities have similarly lost their careers over incidents deemed offensive, including racist comments, misogynistic behaviors, domestic abuse, and sexual assault. Many will never make it back to their previous levels of fame or popularity. The question then becomes what personal behaviors warrant a total fall from grace? Who decides what goes too far? And are they given a fair trial in the court of public opinion? Obviously, certain behaviors are egregious enough that there needs to be accountability, but in some cases, many are quick to make judgments about celebrities, sports stars, and social media creators that can ruin careers before all the facts are known. Given the stakes, maybe we should ask ourselves if social media is indeed the best place to try these high-profile cases, where the only due process is the click of a button and users themselves end up serving as judge, jury, and executioner all at once.