Logan Paul has made waves for several controversial vlogs in recent weeks, but he apparently hasn’t violated one of YouTube’s main policies just yet.
“We do have a three-strikes rule, and if somebody violates three times, then we terminate those accounts,” the video-sharing website’s CEO Susan Wojcicki said while speaking at Recode’s Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, California, on Monday, February 12, via CNBC. “[Paul] hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes, so we can’t just be pulling people off of our platform. They need to violate a policy and we need to have consistent behavior.”
The 22-year-old first sparked controversy after he posted a since-deleted YouTube video on December 31 that showed him and his friends discovering the corpse of a man who appeared to have hung himself from a tree in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. He later apologized and claimed his intentions were good, tweeting that he shared the graphic clip to “raise awareness for suicide prevention.”
Paul took a brief hiatus from the site before returning on January 24 with a PSA about suicide awareness. But he came under fire again on February 5 when he uploaded a vlog that showed him tasering two dead rats and pretending to perform CPR on a live fish that he removed from his koi pond. He also recently encouraged his 4.2 million Twitter followers to participate in a viral and dangerous challenge in which people attempt to eat Tide Pods, in addition to saying in another recent vlog that he is “not going anywhere.”
YouTube has removed the internet personality from its Google Preferred program and temporarily suspended advertising on his channels. The platform said in a statement to Us Weekly on February 9 that he has “exhibited a pattern of behavior in his videos that makes his channel not only unsuitable for advertisers, but also potentially damaging to the broader creator community.”
If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or considering suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).