If you keep up with insignificant YouTube drama like me, you might have heard about the Cody Ko vs. Jake Paul “feud”, or Jake-Paul-trying-to-call-out-Cody-Ko-and-awkwardly-failing. Both YouTubers started out on Vine but have taken a different route on their YouTube careers. Cody does his comedy in the form of “commentary videos”, where he uses satire to point out inconsistencies in other YouTubers, such as Jake Paul. In fact, many of his earlier videos were making fun of himself! Meanwhile, Jake is a vlogger who makes vlogs and…
I’m actually not sure what he does. Let me look this up.
Straight from his YouTube channel description: “The squad “Team 10” & I are always making comedy vids, acting, doing action sports, & going on crazy adventures”.
Cody Ko has made a few videos commenting on Jake Paul such as his infamous music videos. While his jokes are certainly not G-Rated, they’re never extremely offensive or hurtful. They’re jokes.
Due to this, Jake claims in a recent video that Cody is cyberbullying him and “kids”. However, when he confronts Cody about this in his video, he is unable to bring up any clear examples of actual children he is “bullying”. Jake certainly cannot be an example of this either, considering the fact that he is a grown man. He also claims that Cody has a very young audience that looks up to him. However, in Cody’s most recent podcast, he states that while he may have some high school fans, his YouTube demographics have shown his audience is between 18-24. This is something Jake Paul cannot attest to, since his demographic has ranged between 7-13 years old. If there is anybody who should be ensuring that their content is safe for children, it’s Jake.
Jake’s content is often sexualized, and his pranks have been criticized as forms of bullying. In fact, the Martinez Twins have accused Jake Paul for abusing and bullying them. If you just take a scroll down his recent YouTube videos, even his Twitter and Instagram, there is no evidence that Jake has catered to his extremely young audience.
The problem with this whole situation is that Jake Paul is mistaking critique for bullying. Commentary YouTuber Jarvis Johnson’s video makes an excellent point about this: critique is not the same as bullying. He also says that it’s impossible to bully Jake Paul, because he is not vulnerable. Jake has a lot of power and influence.
“It could be shaming someone for the way they look or pulling a bunch of pranks and practical jokes on them, but the most important ingredient is that they’re vulnerable. The person you’re bullying has to be vulnerable.” Jarvis states. “Making fun of Jake Paul is not the same thing as making fun of a random person on the street.”
It is shameful of Jake to tell his young, impressionable audience, that someone is a bully and “full of hatred” for critiquing someone who, arguably, has done many wrong things. Critique happens, especially when you’re someone like Jake Paul who:
A) has done some very questionable things (to the point where he’s had an entire Shane Dawson docu-series done about him), and
B) has 18 million subscribers.
Jake is not Mother Teresa who is helping children in poverty, and Cody, along with many others, would probably not critique him if he was doing so. However, that’s not the case.
It’s difficult to take Jake’s message of “spreading positivity” seriously, when his entire career has been fueled on controversy and harmfully pranking others. Due to the backlash from his video, Jake has since made upset tweets that he’s just simply trying to spread positivity, and he’s being attacked for having a positive message. Once again, Jake is mistaking critique with attack. Nobody is making fun of the positive message, simply the person it’s ironically coming from. Not to mention, in the first minute of his video he says, “There’s this douchebag named Cody Ko, and we’re going to fuck his life up”. Now that’s not very positive, is it?
If Jake is really concerned with making appropriate content for children and spreading positivity, he might start by changing the content he produces and not attacking others for criticizing him.
At the end of the day, Jake is only worried about one thing, and that’s himself.