YouTube chief says controversial Logan Paul won't get the banhammer

APD NEWS

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YouTube might have cut off Logan Paul's ad revenue, dropped him from Google Preferred and suspended his planned original projects, but that doesn't mean he'll get booted off the platform anytime soon.

In an interview at Recode's annual Code Media conference, YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki said Paul won't be getting banned from the video website anytime soon. "He hasn't done anything that would cause those three strikes," she explained when host Kara Swisher asked why the company hasn't banned Paul. "We can't just be pulling people off our platform... They need to violate a policy."

Wojcicki is talking about YouTube's three strikes policy, which states that the platform will terminate creators' accounts if they get three strikes within a three-month period.

According to the Google-owned company's community guidelines, creators can get strikes if they videos "contain nudity or sexual content, violent or graphic content, harmful or dangerous content, hateful content, threats, spam, misleading metadata, or scams."

Logan Paul has been under fire ever since he posted a video showing the body of a suicide victim while joking around and laughing in Japan's Aokigahara forest.

While he apologized and published a suicide prevention video afterward, he has also followed that up with a video of him tasering dead rats and a tweet saying he'd join that dangerous/ridiculous internet Tide Pods challenge.

YouTube was also hit by a wave of criticism over the role it played in hosting his videos, putting its relationship with advertisers in jeopardy. The event forced it to change its Google Preferred moderation system and to introduce new punishments to address creators' "egregious actions."

Wojcicki said YouTube won't be banning Paul (yet) despite all the backlash it got, because the platform "need[s] to have consistent laws" so that it can apply its policies consistently to millions of videos and creators. She added: "What you think is tasteless is not necessarily what someone else would think is tasteless."

(ENGADGET)