What Logan Paul and Monica Lewinsky can teach us about responsibility of speech

Two weeks ago, YouTube suspended ads on Logan Paul’s channel temporarily. YouTube released a statement.

“In response to Logan Paul’s recent pattern of behavior, we’ve temporarily suspended ads on his channels.”

If you’re wondering who this kid is, this 22-year-old vlogger has more than 16 million subscribers and earns up to $1.2 million/ month in ad revenue from his videos. The reasons YouTube made this decision are probable. Paul has demonstrated countless disturbing behavior in his videos, ranging from tasering a dead rat to showing a dead body in Japan’s Aokigahara forest (also known as the “Suicide Forest”). I can name all his reckless incidents but that would just be a waste of your time. To stop you from shaking your head, let’s talk about the responsibility of speech on the Internet.

Thinking back on Monica Lewinsky’s talk at Ted Talk in 2015, I realized she is one of the first publicized cyberbullying victims since the digital revolution. Lewinsky shared her price of shame from the scandal that had put her reputation in the dark for ten years.

“Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day, and some, tragically, don’t, and there’s nothing virtual about that.” Said Monica Lewinsky at TED2015.

When TED posted her talk, negative and offensive comments flooded the comment section. The director of social media at TED, Nadia Petschek Rawls, took actions with her team and started deleting those comments and responding to positive comments.

“After hours spent boosting the positive comments and purging most of the brutish ones, the tide started to turn. People started to write things like, ‘Brave woman. My first reaction was negative before I even clicked the link — then I realized that was the whole point and why she was the perfect person to give this talk.’”

The modern-day Internet users have become less empathic and desensitized towards cyberbullying, trolling and invasion of privacy from the culture we permitted (i.e. meme culture) and worsened via the unlimited accessibility of information.

It’s tricky to govern the Internet when it involves the freedom of speech. However, I think higher authority should limit the spread of harmful content by taking systematic actions, so the digital space remains a safe space for everyone disregarding age, gender, age, ethnicity, religion and beyond. YouTube and TED did the right thing here and we should continue implementing and moderating the public platforms.

As digital marketers, we should be responsible for the quality, fairness and objectivity in our own work. If we start a movement to have compassion and empathy in our work, we can encourage other people to do the same too. Like what Nadia observes, “I think of that moment of sea change like a sort of herd immunity. The positive voices, when there are enough of them, keep abusive ones from spreading, just as a mostly vaccinated population protects those few people who are not. Together, we have the power to protect the most vulnerable among us.”