If you have been anywhere near social media news outlets recently, you have heard about Logan Paul’s vlog about his expedition in Japan, where Paul and his friends were trekking through the Aokigahara (Suicide Forest) when they stumbled upon a man hanging from a tree. The group wanted to explore the ‘haunted’ aspect of the forest; however, their reaction to the body is what is sparking real controversy.

Instead of leaving the man, Paul proceeds to film the body commenting on the purple discoloration of the man’s hands. The group chose to deal with the situation by laughing at the idea: “We just found a dead body.” The video has since been taken down but not before it hit the front page of YouTube at number ten on trending videos and reaching 6.3 million views.

Junior Michael Todd had this to say on the production of the video: “I questioned why he would actually take the time to edit and post this to a site with children or people who actually struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. That could easily lead to impressionable kids trying to go there themselves or convincing someone to do something even worse because he did it.”

After seeing the outrage caused by his video, Paul released both an apology tweet and video making the following statement: “I’ve made a severe and continuous lapse of my judgment and I don’t expect to be forgiven I’m simply here to apologize so what we came across that day in the woods was obviously unplanned and the reactions you saw on tape were raw they were unfiltered none of us knew how to react or how to feel I should have never posted the video I should have put the cameras down and stopped recording what we were going through there’s a lot of things I should have done differently.”

As stated the group wished to go into the forest to discover the ‘haunted’ aspect of the forest, and when dealing with the circumstances presented to them used humor as an awkward coping mechanism to comfort themselves in a foreign situation. Senior Ella Waddell said, “That is okay in the moment, but when you keep it in the video and post it for all the world to see, that is not okay.”

According to Adam Lusher at Independent, Paul wrote that the video was supposed to raise awareness to suicide and suicide prevention and how at one point in the video there was a note of seriousness where a serious face was put on and Paul said, “Suicide is not a joke; depression and mental illnesses are not a joke.” The rise of this video begs the question who is in the wrong– Logan Paul or the YouTube Staff?

YouTube Policies states, “It’s not okay to post violent or gory content that’s primarily intended to be shocking, sensational or gratuitous” as well as “Don’t Try to shock or disgust your viewers. Don’t Emphasise violent content by zooming, looping or using other editing techniques that take away from your message.” YouTube also claims to have staff monitoring flagged content 24/7 to determine if videos violate the community guidelines yet the video “WE FOUND A DEAD BODY!!! **emotional**” was able stay posted for over 24 hours. Michael Todd responded to YouTube’s lack in response saying, “Recently YouTube has made several mistakes regarding filtering videos and frankly it’s just ridiculous that this should be allowed to be posted and stay up for so long.” Ella Waddell added, “I think YouTube should monitor the use of the subject and take down videos that use this subject matter unwisely.”

Whether you side with Logan Paul and are part of his multi-million dollar “Logang” empire or if you believe that Logan’s entire channel should be taken down and more precautions should be put in place to make sure videos like these never happen again, one thing is for sure– Logan Paul should have put the camera down and left the scene as soon as he saw the body out of respect to the forest and the souls residing there.