Infamous YouTuber Logan Paul started a Twitch channel yesterday, and he reached 100,000 followers without streaming once. If you go to the channel right now, the chat alternates between spamming racial slurs and ascii penises. Following the Fortnite bandwagon has turned into a mess for the Paul brothers.
The Paul brothers have a reputation for toxicity. Jake ended up on a local news station for being such a nuisance to their neighbours, and is known for uploading cringey rap videos. Jake’s brother Logan uploaded a video of a suicide victim in Japan’s Aokigahara, known as the “suicide forest.” Logan came under fire for exploiting someone’s death for views, as well as generally being an arsehole all around Japan.
Despite leaving a wake of controversy wherever they go, the brothers both have over ten million subscribers each on YouTube.
While the Pauls have dabbled in gaming before, they’re mostly known for vlogs. But, Fortnite is a phenomenon right now – even Drake is playing it. The Paul brothers aren’t ones to miss out on this new trend, and each of them uploaded a vlog featuring the game in some capacity over the weekend.
In Logan’s vlog, titled, “What The Heck Is A Fortnite?” the older Paul brother specifically cites wanting to play the game with Drake as a motivation for picking the shooter up.
More controversially, Jake’s vlog has a thumbnail featuring the most famous Fortnite player around, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. The video is titled “I Donate $US200k To My Favourite Streamer (insane reaction),” making it seem as if Jake Paul was donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the most visible Fortnite player around.
Instead, the video is mostly a vlog about the Paul brothers’ ongoing feud with KSI, another YouTube channel, and doesn’t feature Ninja at all. Jake’s vlog has over 2 million views. The highest rated comment on this video reads, “see what we arent [sic] gonna do is clickbait our boy Ninja,” and other commenters freely call Jake’s use of Ninja’s face “clickbait.”
As the Paul’s antics somewhat involve him, Ninja addressed the situation, first by having his mods ban anyone who talked about Jake Paul, and then by speaking in generalities about a “popular John Smith.”
“A popular John Smith uploaded a video that had nothing to do with me, and used my face as clickbait,” Ninja said. “This person is very wealthy, and does not need to do these things for views,” he said. “This John Smith isn’t stupid and is getting what he wants, which is people to talk about it. …You’re getting baited, and you’re letting it happen.”
Such blatant bandwagoning has people worried that the Pauls’ toxicity is going to drag down the Fortnite community, if not Twitch as a platform. When you search “Logan Paul Fortnite” on twitter, you see streamers asking Twitch to “carefully think” about whether to allow Logan Paul on the platform. One streamer went so far as to call Twitch “tainted.”
It’s true that Logan’s channel is already both incredibly popular and has one of the worst chats imaginable, full of Trihard emotes, sketchy “free V-bucks” links and sometimes drawings of penises. While Logan Paul isn’t specifically breaking the rules here, the activity in his chat is definitely against Twitch’s Community Guidelines, which prohibit spam, sexual content and discrimination and harassment based on race.
Historically, Twitch has been pro-active about banning controversial streamers who break their terms of service.The Pauls have already faced repercussions from the relatively more lax YouTube for their controversial content: After the Aokigahara vlog, Logan Paul was removed from the Google Preferred ad tier, and his YouTube Red movie was “put on hold.” Kotaku has reached out to Twitch for comment but they did not respond in time for publication.
It makes sense for two of the biggest YouTubers in the world to try the biggest game of the moment. Fortnite and Twitch are almost incidental factors in the Pauls’s quest to get people to talk about them – they just happen to be what’s hot right now.
Comments
23 responses to “The Paul Brothers’ Attempt To Bandwagon Fortnite Turns Messy”
Get some self awareness kotaku ffs
Man, if only there was a way that people who had the power to report on Logan Paul had a way of not using that power to give more attention to Logan Paul.
Hmm, can’t think of one. Hey, here’s another Logan Paul article.
Exactly. FFS stop giving these pricks a loudspeaker. Vapid, useless people who offer nothing entertaining or interesting.
Ironically by posting here ourselves we are displaying a silly lack of self awareness also, adding comments to an article that shouldn’t get any, thereby attracting more people who see the number of comments and go oooooo must be interesting!
We’re thru the looking Glass here people!
Yeah that was my first thought as soon as I clicked on the article
Yes. Editorial decision “No more Paul Brother articles” unless its an article on how to get these douches permanently off my trending/recommends or their perma-ban from youtube.
Such punchable faces…
Seriously though, don’t talk about these arsebeards, Kotaku. It’s like how nobody reruns the Cosby Show anymore. They may play games but we don’t accept them within our culture.
No such thing as ‘punchable’ faces for civilised folk, but the sentiment rings true. I couldn’t imagine looking at a face like that for a whole minute let alone subscribing to it! Talk about a face only a mother could love…
Nah man, I’d punch them. If I saw them doing their thing in Australia and being dicks for clicks, I’d find it hard to resist the opportunity.
Tony Abbott has been head butted twice within a year. It’d be un-Australian not to at this point.
Gaming is a culture?
You’re posting on Kotaku and asking that?
To be fair, according to Kotaku “gamers are dead”.
We kind of are. It’s not the identity it once was. I certainly don’t feel like I’m at all part of a niche anymore. I think that’s why some Twitch users got so salty about bikini girls playing PUBG or whatevs: It was indicative of change of demographic. Some peeps are gonna mourn the loss of our little thing being ours and ours alone. But Drake plays Fortnite now. Times have changed and we all have to move on and share.
The people who get overtly pissy (and this isn’t aimed at you, Ninjabees) about ‘gamers being dead’, and gaming culture being ‘taken over’ by [insert petty grievance of choice here] fail to recognise that a decade ago, gaming culture was different, and it had changed markedly in the decade before that, too. Things move on and change for better or worse (very much the latter in the case of youtube/streaming culture, methinks). Sadly, it’s just a sign of aging. Personally, I still haven’t quite gotten over how things have changed from the golden era from the mid-90s to the mid-noughties.
I’m also in the 90’s-00’s being superior years camp. But then again I’m 38 now.
Triple J sounds worse and I don’t dig watching other people playing games when I could be just playing them myself.
It’s definitely change aversion, but it’s cool. Individuals cannot own a culture.
I had no idea that Logan Paul existed before Kotaku started writing articles on him.
He appears to provide nothing of substance and I am still bewildered as to why he receives any coverage or subscribers.
Yeah no. Most of the twitch audience more than likely does not like the paul brothers and will do everything in their limited powers to get thm both banned from twitch,
Their fanbase has an average age of 12, what did you expect?
If nothing else, YouTube, Twitch etc are an interesting experiment in media. Does the media actually NEED a watchdog or any regulatory oversight? Or if left to its own devices, will it essentially police itself?
Or, more insiduously, are people like this guy effectively using social media to train themselves to be more effective manipulators and propagandists later in life? Or are they like a virus, hurling themselves against the T-cells of public ridicule, while others sit back and go “hmn, okay that’s what NOT to do…”
Kinda worried about what’s going to happen when the YouTube generation gets old enough to find religion…
Televangelists of the 80s would have killed for the monetisation possibilities offered by YouTube.
not sure who’s worst.
This logan guy or the people who subcribe to him.
You know what’s also hot right now? The giant steaming turd my dog just left in my yard. Except that turd has more charisma and general value than the Paul brothers combined.