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Here’s why YouTube hasn’t banned Logan Paul for good

The company has a three strikes rule. Paul doesn’t have three strikes, says CEO Susan Wojcicki.

YouTuber Logan Paul
YouTuber Logan Paul
Frazer Harrison / Getty

Some people believe YouTube star Logan Paul should be kicked off YouTube for good.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is not one of those people.

Paul, who has almost 17 million YouTube subscribers, is currently in YouTube’s doghouse for a few questionable videos — one in which Paul filmed what appeared to be a suicide victim from Japan’s Aokigahara forest, and a second in which he tased a dead rat.

As punishment, YouTube has “temporarily” suspended ads on Paul’s YouTube videos, which means Paul won’t make money from ads running before his videos.

Some believe Paul’s behavior warrants a more severe punishment. A Change.org petition with more than 610,000 signatures says his video of the suicide victim was “disgusting and shouldn’t be tolerated.”

Wojcicki, though, says Paul shouldn’t be kicked off for good despite calling his videos “a pattern of egregious behavior.” The reason? He hasn’t violated the company’s three strikes policy, she said.

“We do have a three strikes rule, and if somebody violates [our policies] three times, we do terminate those accounts and we do that all the time,” Wojcicki said Monday from Recode’s Code Media Conference in Huntington Beach, Calif. “He hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes.”

Listen to her full answer below:

Those policies are still coming together. Just last week, YouTube unveiled new steps short of an outright ban that it would take to punish creators who violate its policies, including curtailing a creator’s ability to make money from ads.

Part of the challenge is that YouTube doesn’t seem to want to take full responsibility for deciding what is right and what is wrong on the internet. (In it’s blog post Friday it referred to this as “freedom of expression.”) Wojcicki was careful to refer to YouTube as a “technology platform” and not a media company, a distinction that Facebook also makes for fear of being seen as the ultimate arbiter of what is allowed and what isn’t.

“What you think is tasteless is not necessarily what someone else would see as tasteless,” Wojcicki added. “We need to have consistent laws codified in our policies so that [our system] can be trained and we can apply it consistently to millions of videos and millions of creators.”

Watch Wojcicki’s full interview:


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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