Title: Who Is Logan Paul, and What Happened in His Video That Was Taken Down? - The Atlantic
Headings: The Social-Media Star and the Suicide
Technology
The Social-Media Star and the Suicide

Content: In every step but the filming of the dead body, this is not the system breaking, but the system functioning as intended. And as with the recent discovery of widespread exploitation on “child-safe” parts of YouTube, it points to a dark tendency in today’s engagement-optimized web. As online platforms have pursued engagement to the detriment of everything else, they have come to favor content that dehumanizes us. Meanwhile, the same platforms dominate more and more of teen culture. People may want to punish Paul’s crassness and disrespect, but he, like every other social-media star, was responding to the incentives we’ve set up. We stuck a smartphone in every 14-year-old’s hand and told them it could make them famous. Little wonder that the kids who won that lottery don’t know when to turn the camera off. Little wonder that before the backlash, Paul’s video was going viral. The internet’s only currency is attention. An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that YouTube deleted the video.