The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 2.13 Logan Paul Mural Controversy, Problem w/ $$$ and News on YouTube, Reebok Backlash, & More

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

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Sup you beautiful bastards, hope you're having a fantastic Wednesday. Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco show and today We're gonna do something a little bit different. I'm actually out of the office today So I wanted to do what we normally do on Fridays and cover more viewer requested stories from the week so far So with that said let's just jump into it. And the first thing we're gonna talk about today is actually an update to a story We covered earlier this week. It was that story out of Toronto where a woman allegedly I don't know why people are saying she's accused and allegedly unless there was CGI involved It seems pretty straightforward the woman who threw that chair off of that balcony, you know in that video that blew up It went viral, crashed into the ground below luckily according to reports

No one was hurt, but following that there was this investigation People trying to find out who it was and the big update woman in question has surrendered herself to police and she has been identified as 19 year old Marcella Zoya according to CP 24 She will be charged with mischief, endangering life, mischief to property, and common nuisance. So yeah, that's the situation as it is now. And just, of course, the main point of this story has always been, don't be stupid, stupid.

Not only did you do an incredibly stupid, disgusting thing because you just had a complete disregard for the lives of others, you filmed it. Which I guess if you're stupid enough to actually throw the thing, you're stupid enough to film it. And yeah, good luck to you with these charges because it appears that no one is on your side. I mean, and so actually in a way, thank you. In these trying and divisive times,

it's very hard for a lot of us all together to find common footing, but this woman helped us do it. Yeah, thank you, Marcella. Then, in a pairing I wasn't expecting this week, we had Reebok and Russia in the news. So if you're not aware, Reebok has a campaign angle that involves female empowerment. And in the United States, as part of these campaigns, you've had people like Ariana Grande, Gal Gadot, also Gigi Hadid.

You see it right there in the text, "'Be more human, making change. "'We change the world every time we lead by example.'" But the situation with Reebok in Russia was slightly different. The Russian campaign launched last Thursday It was a mixture of activists and athletes including a champion jiu-jitsu fighter and one of the slogans They featured read stop sitting on the needle of male approval start sitting on men's faces

Reportedly this slogan was from the mind of Zelina Martian Kulova Who's a feminist campaigner who also appeared in the promotion and following the release of this ad there was backlash and according to reports Martian kulova responded on facebook with lord save russia from me and from kundalingai we live in a world where advertising is a zone of chauvinism and in every second woman is used as bait and also saying she never thought reebok was actually going to use her slogan but still reportedly told her followers before the backlash began it's time to stop worrying about what others think of you stop being afraid of being not the good kind of woman. Stop adjusting your life and your looks to what your partner or neighbor said. But still, as far as the ultimate result,

we saw Reebok pulling this ad. We also saw Alexander Golofost, the marketing director behind this, resigning. He also defended the campaign, saying, "'In this slogan, there are two parts, "'approval and pleasure. "'The first part calls for being yourself, "'and the second part calls for people

"'to give each other pleasure.'" But still, officially, as far as Reebok is concerned they had a spokesperson say that unfortunately a local execution of this campaign in Russia did not meet these standards. This execution of our be more human campaign which was pulled as soon as we were made aware of it was not authorized by Reebok. The overall campaign however will continue as planned. But with that said I do want to pass the question off to you as far as what do you think about this ad? Do you feel like the ad actually went too far, or no, this is female empowerment, it's putting the shoe on the other foot,

or no, because the opposite of this would be like saying, force yourself on women. I've seen all sorts of arguments, and I wanna hear what your thoughts are. Then in internetty news bleeding into the mainstream, we had Logan Paul in the news, although it wasn't for something that he recently did. We actually had a local report here in LA

because there was outrage over this. It's a mural, seemingly, of Logan Paul in the outfit from the Suicide Forest video hanging from well just a rope. But what's really interesting in their report is that they say that this mural is open to interpretation and then they feature someone's talking about what they personally see and why they're fearful. I immediately knew what it was for because I saw the pride flag on its on his shirt. So I immediately knew it was directed at the LGBT community and that was heartbreaking

But others are wondering if this has anything to do with vlogger Logan Paul What do you mean others are wondering if it has to do with Logan Paul? You showed the mural and then immediately showed Logan Paul wearing that exact same outfit I feel like it's a pretty safe bet to say that's what the mural was about now I'm not gonna discount Buffy for not knowing that whole controversy that happened over a year ago. I just don't think that it makes sense given the blatantly obvious evidence with this situation

for there to be any water given to the argument that this is some sort of attack on the LGBT community. But what's also interesting with this story is the fact that it is just now popping up. Based off of an image that's on Instagram, it appears that this mural has been there since at least January 29th. Also in this report from KTLA,

they note that the police say they have yet to field any reports about the street art. But yeah, in general, that's the story. I don't see this personally as an attack on the LGBTQ community. It seems like, if anything, just a simple attack or commentary around Logan Paul. Then let's talk about Reddit and China.

So last week, there were rumors that Reddit was going to be receiving a major investment from the Chinese tech giant Tencent. Notably here Tencent owns the messaging and social media application WeChat as well as massively popular games such as League of Legends and Clash of Clans As well as a partial ownership of PUBG and Fortnite among others. And so following these rumors the reddit community immediately voiced concerns over censorship on the website for posts that may portray China in a bad light. Right because if you think of massive Chinese tech company you're thinking of China and the political party there, and it's important to know that these kinds of posts,

like the negative China posts, and even Reddit itself, are banned in China. And so in response to this, we saw Reddit users flood the site with images that are banned by the Chinese government, specifically the Tank Man from the Tiananmen Square protest, along with images like my personal favorite, Winnie the Pooh.

But with all that said, after all of this controversy, Reddit actually confirmed on Monday that it raised $300 million in its last round of funding with $150 million of it coming from Tencent. This also resulting in Reddit having a $3 billion valuation. So the big burning question that is at hand is, can Tencent actually influence censorship of Reddit

outside of China? And the answer is a hopeful probably not. While China does censor content outside of its borders, it's usually just on native Chinese apps tied to mainland accounts. For example, WeChat users outside of China. And the answer is a hopeful probably not. While China does censor content outside of its borders, it's usually just on native Chinese apps tied to mainland accounts. For example, WeChat users outside of China are still censored if they use an account connected to a mainland ID, which may cause concern because WeChat is owned by Tencent and according to research director for technology and democracy at Freedom House, Adrian Shabazz, censorship in China is not executed by the state. With him saying, In reality, it's the companies in charge of weeding out unfavorable information online. There's a whole host of regulations, one new law passed on average every two days,

about what content can and cannot appear online. Adding, then it falls to Chinese companies to comply with this widespread censorship regime set by the Communist Party itself. And while all of that to me and probably you sounds incredibly concerning, it's also important to remember that many US companies have received huge Chinese investments and haven't been subject to censorship in the US. Companies like Spotify, Epic Games, and Snapchat have all received significant investments from Tencent itself and haven't experienced the kind of censorship Reddit users are concerned about. And so right now, I would personally put this in the category of a

skeptical, concerned, going to keep an eye on it. But the fear around this right now might be overhyped. And I say that as someone that is incredibly skeptical and suspicious of China, and I'm talking about the Communist Party and the people in power, not just your everyday people. And the last thing we're gonna talk about today is a story involving the news business. And this story was actually recommended because our name was thrown into the mix.

NPR has a show called The 1A, and they had a few people from the news industry there, including a Buzzfeed executive, and they were talking about monetization, specifically of news on YouTube. And in the show, we hear this back and forth happen. Ben Smith, is there anything on your wish list for Google or Facebook or Amazon or any of these ad business giants that would make BuzzFeed News' lot in life easier? I mean, how is that relationship going? I think, as Amanda says, their willingness to work with us on subscription products is valuable, more valuable to places that are primarily subscription-driven. Advertising supported business. If you look across YouTube, the only way to do news in YouTube is to be like Amanda's Austin neighbor, Alex Jones, and just sit there and make stuff up. Because the economics of doing journalism just don't work on the biggest video platform in the world.

They don't work on the biggest social platform in the world. And I think that's – Well, I don't know that that's true. I think Philip DeFranco would disagree with you. He's found a way to do news and comment before he was acquired by Discovery Communications that wasn't there's just not an ecosystem on YouTube of news organizations that are able to build a business that employ journalists who take the time to go and check facts. So I'm trying to think of where to start with this. One, I really, really, really dislike the overgeneralization. The only way that you can tackle news on YouTube is to be Alex Jones and, in his words, make stuff up. I feel like that's incredibly dismissive and it feeds this narrative that, you know,

mainstream media journalists, they're these snooty, condescending people. Also, before moving forward, I do want to make clear, I do not see myself personally as a journalist. While certain pieces on the Philip DeFranco show involve, you know, from scratch, original reporting, investigative journalism, reaching out for comments, trying to fact check,

and some of those are deeper dives than others. I mean, a lot of what I view the Philip DeFranco show as accomplishing is that we consolidate we break down we fact-check as much As possible using the team and then we comment and so kind of what we've been trying to do over the past year and a half Has been a reverse engineer a new news organization Like I fully acknowledge that we're still figuring things out as we're trying and experimenting in public But I get so happy when I see comments like this one on morning videos I sometimes forget that this channel isn't just a guy talking about news anymore, but pretty much an actual news channel, and I love it Thank you. We'll try it sometimes complete chaos, but to BuzzFeed's point the monetization part is a very big hurdle

Even with all the different ways we've figured out to monetize I mean if you look at what we're trying to do It's a shoestring budget also as far as far as onboarding, we can't really compete with the big guys who can throw out salaries that are very hard for us to match. So we hire young and hungry and we build up from there. All to put out more news pieces, which usually don't end up having a sponsor attached to it.

You don't know if it's gonna get demonetized. Kind of, if you look at that piece alone, you're just losing money on it. Are you trying to get more of that while spinning plates to try and make sure that the monetization is there in general? And so at times it can feel very unstable and you question, you know, what is sustainable, what is not, as you're trying to build and add on top of things and that adds risk. And it's one of the reasons why when we launched Franco Elite, we said, you know, this is going to take a long, long time. It's one of the reasons why when we launched that, we didn't say that we were going to turn off ads.

And it's one of the reasons why we continually try and diversify revenue streams so we can support what we're doing. And so with kind of all of this said, I kind of want to say this one time I usually don't address stuff like this. One of the frustrating things to me, and I understand that it's like it's the vocal minority, these, it's not the people that are supporting me and that's who I need to probably care about the most. But when people think that I'm going down this road or I'm not actually building something out and this is all a ploy to make as much money as possible. Let me be clear, I would be making so, so, so much more money if I was not trying to build this company out and add bodies to be able to put out more content. But this is something I, the team that we've had, and the team that we are bringing on care about.

Also, I will acknowledge that including this story and making these points in the viewer requested video, which are kind of lighter stories, is not the best way to have this conversation. But yeah, I guess long story short, the kind of dismissing of news coverage on YouTube in that way, it's stupid. Regarding funding of an organization that's trying to grow and build and have a team of journalists, pretty right.

There are a few of us out there that are figuring out every which way to keep the lights on and grow. But on that note, if there are a few of us out there that are figuring out every which way to keep the lights on and grow. But on that note, if there are any young journalists, well established journalists, award winning journalists, and maybe you want to slum it somewhere where the money may not flow but the opportunity is aplenty. The things we talk about on a bad day just in one place get viewed at least half a million times with the average video getting 1 to 1.5. That's not an ego stroking flex or something, It's just me commenting on the reality of the situation, the very unique, lucky, weird situation that we have right now.

And we're doing all this in a way and at a certain rate where we're not going to need to lay off like a tenth of our staff at some point. But yeah, there's that. I don't know if I actually said anything meaningful. I am so, so tired. I am ready for this long weekend I'm giving myself. But, like with any and all stories, I'd love to know your thoughts on this one. And that's where I'm going to end today's show. And remember, if you like this video, you like the dives into the news,

let me know. Hit that like button. Also, if you're new here, hit that subscribe button. Ring that bell to turn on notifications. And if you missed and you want to catch up on the last Morning News deep dive, the last Philip DeFranco show, you can click or tap right there to watch those. But, with that said, of course, as always, my name's Philip DeFranco.. You can click or tap right there to watch those. But with that said, of course, as always, my name's Philip DeFranco. You've just been filled in. I love yo faces and I'll see you tomorrow.