The public rebukes of Logan Paul continue to roll in, with Ova, a Japanese suicide prevention group, lambasting the YouTube sensation for his recent video that showed the dead body of a suicide victim.
“It is totally unacceptable to show someone who was driven to suicide as if it’s humorous content,” Jiro Ito, the head of Ova, told The Japan Times.
In the infamous video, now pulled from YouTube, Paul comes across a corpse hanging from a tree in Aokigahara forest — notorious for being a go-to spot for Japanese suicide victims. At one point, Paul yells, “Yo, are you alive?” at the body.
Ito said the clip ran afoul of how the World Health Organization recommends the media cover suicides, telling the newspaper Paul’s video “raises serious issues from the point of suicide prevention.”
The clip was immediately slammed across the internet. Paul posted an initial apology to Twitter on Monday evening, and followed it with a video mea culpa to his 15 million followers on Tuesday.
“I want to apologize to the internet, I want to apologize to anyone who’s seen the video, I want to apologize to anyone who has been affected or touched by mental illness or depression or suicide,” said Paul in the video. “But most importantly, I want to apologize to the victim, and his family.”
One crisis management expert told TheWrap Paul’s second apology would have been better if it had included a donation or shown support to a prominent anti-suicide program.
6 Tech Giants Shaking Up News, From Jeff Bezos to Laurene Powell Jobs (Photos)
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.
Jeff Bezos – Washington Post
The Amazon founder purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. President Trump has called the paper the “Amazon Washington Post.”
The Facebook co-founder purchased The New Republic in 2012, becoming executive chairman and publisher. However, he sold the venerable political magazine to Win McCormack in 2016, saying he "underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate."
The eBay founder is a well-known philanthropist who created First Look Media, a journalism venture behind The Intercept. Inspired by Edward Snowden's leaks. Omidyar teamed up with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras to launch the website “dedicated to the kind of reporting those disclosures required: fearless, adversarial journalism.”
The PayPal co-founder doesn’t own a news organization, but he makes this list because he essentially ended one -- Gawker -- proving once again the power of an angry billionaire. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker Media because he was upset that the website once outed him as gay. Hogan won the defamation lawsuit against the site that sent its parent company into bankruptcy, and Gawker.com is no longer operating.
OK, so Facebook isn’t technically a news organization… yet. However, the company is preparing to launch its much-anticipated lineup of original content later this summer, and there are also signs that it's on the verge of becoming an even bigger media platform.
Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, confirmed last week it’s developing a subscription service for publishers willing to post articles directly to Facebook Instant Articles, rather than their native websites.
Tech is increasingly intertwined with news, for better or worse
Tech leaders are increasingly intertwined with the news business. While some want to support old properties, one set out to destroy a new one. Here they are.