Recently, an interesting series on YouTube about the controversial YouTuber Jake Paul has received a lot of coverage on various channels and is taking over the platform.
Shane Dawson is an influencer who has been creating content on YouTube for more than 10 years. With more than 18 million subscribers and 4 billion collective views on his videos, Dawson has one of the largest channels on YouTube.
Because of his dark sense of humor and relatable personality, Dawson is able to entertain people as he gives viewers a glimpse of who popular YouTubers are beyond the camera. In the case of Jeffree Star, he garnered about 95 million views on five videos and was able to shift some viewers beliefs about Star’s character by having him reveal things about his life most people did not know.
When that series was over, people were excited to find out which influencer Dawson was going to be featuring on his channel next. However, when Dawson revealed his next subject would be the controversial YouTuber Jake Paul, people were not as excited. On various social media platforms, Dawson was criticized because people felt he was going to make Paul seem too likeable.
Across the platform, many people dislike Paul because of his childish and destructive behavior. In his videos he can be seen lighting swimming pools on fire and knocking down walls for pranks in his rental home. His presence was also a nuisance to his neighbors as the front of the house he and his crew (Team 10) lived in was often flooded with screaming children wanting to see Paul and his friends. It’s actions such as these that have made Paul one of the most disliked personalities on YouTube.
Despite the backlash, people were still curious to see how Dawson would portray Paul. The first video in the heavily anticipated series was set to release on Sept. 25. “What I do know though is that tens of millions of eyes will be pointed in Shane Dawson’s direction on Sept.25,” said Philip Defranco, a YouTuber who covers world news. This is exactly what happened when the first video was released.
Currently, four videos of the eight-part series titled “The Mind of Jake Paul” have been released. But, as was expected, Dawson has faced backlash for some of the content in the videos.
As the title highlights, the show is about uncovering why Paul behaves the way he does in his videos. However, the main storyline within the videos focuses on figuring out whether Paul is a sociopath or not. With dramatic editing and creeped out reactions, people were immediately bothered that Dawson was making out the mental illness to be “scary” or “evil.”
People took an even greater issue that Dawson was trying to diagnose someone with a mental illness without any formal training or professional knowledge on the manner. “The bottom line is that it’s both inappropriate and impossible to diagnose someone with any mental disorder by watching a few, or even hundreds of, YouTube videos. Let’s leave the diagnosing to medical professionals,” an online article in Teen Vogue said.
After watching the first two videos in the series, I had similar issues with the docuseries. I felt that Dawson was doing a good job of convincing people that they could diagnose others as sociopaths based on the characteristics he discussed in his videos. In fact, while watching, I found myself reflecting on the behaviors of people I know and wondering whether they fit in this category. But, as Daniel Antonius, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, explained in a Teen Vogue article, “this process can take 12 or more hours of intimate interviews and extensive questionnaires.”
After receiving backlash, Shane did issue an explanation and apology in the third video of the docuseries. He also put a disclaimer at the beginning of the video. “This video contains discussion of personality disorders and is meant for entertainment purposes only. Please do not self-diagnose or diagnose others,” the disclaimer said.
In his apology Dawson does seem sincere, yet I still have issue with the main subject being about uncovering whether Paul is a sociopath or not. The word has too much of a negative connotation to be thrown around for “entertainment purposes.” There are people who deal with the mental illness every day who most likely do not appreciate being depicted as monsters.
While I do find myself being slightly disappointed with the series thus far, I am still excited to see the rest of the videos. I do hope that the tone of the videos does shift and viewers are able to get a better glimpse of Paul, without overly creepy or dramatized editing, so that they themselves can determine whether or not Paul has good character.