The Problem with MrBeast

So, a few days ago, Mrbeast, a YouTuber that is known for philanthropic work, published a video where he “cured” 1000 “Blind People”, enabling them to “see for the first time”. This video sparked a bit of controversy despite reaching over 80 million views and raking in a lot of positive feedback.

Hence, I wanted to talk about my issue with MrBeast and why I personally dislike what he does.

As a disclaimer at this point: I don’t think he should stop doing philanthropic work. It’s good. It obviously helps a lot of people. My big complaint, however, is that just because he does a lot of good things, that doesn’t mean that he’s a saint and that he should be excused from some of the negative things he’s done/he’s known for. Multiple things can be true and I do believe that one can view him critically despite the good he arguably is doing for the world.

Given that this is a bit of a bigger topic, I’ll leave you with some headers to jump towards. Most of the “past controversies” stuff is just things I’ll mention that I don’t want to get into too much, for the sake of keeping the post shorter…

The “current controversy” is in regards to the “curing blindness” video whereas the “Last but not Least” section is all about problems I have with him as a person that I want to criticize but which get defended by people out there in a very cult-like manner that is borderline toxic.

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1. Past Controversies
   1. Homophobia Accusations
   2. Allegations of creating a Toxic Work-Environment
   3. His Appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast
   4. The Cryptocurrency Scandal
   5. The “Recreating Squid Game” Controversy
2. Current Controversy
   1. Lies / “Curing the Blind”
   2. Poverty Porn, and Charity
3. Summary

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Past Controversies

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson is one of the most successful YouTubers in the world He’s still in his early 20s, and is essentially the epitome of the kind of person that would answer “What would you do if you could acquire $10k right now without getting caught?” with “I’d give it to Charity” – because that’s what he did.

MrBeast started going viral online after giving away the 10 or so grand he got for a partnership to random people. His content generated money which he would invest back into the channel, getting more and more elaborate in terms of the charity work he’s been doing and the project he’s come up with in the process.

A lot of his content revolves around challenges that award fans and strangers alike with lots of money – something others tried to replicate but to not as much success as his.

But despite amassing a lot of experience over the years, there have also been a fair share of controversies surrounding MrBeast, possibly even especially because he did start out very young.

Homophobia Accusations

In 2018, The Atlantic took a look at MrBeast’s history of using homophobic slurs online, often as a “joke” or even as a response to haters and fans alike.

When approached for comment, MrBeast responded “I’m not offensive to anyone” before talking about how he’s “just going to ignore it. [He doesn’t] think anyone cares about this stuff” – and well, people do care, otherwise, the news wouldn’t have come out in the first place.

What’s worse, in my opinion, is that he didn’t show any worry at all over his use of the word “fag” but instead, reportedly, tried to skew the interview completely, asking if he could change the answers, answer different questions or if The Atlantic could just write a positive article instead.

I’d suggest reading the article yourself. Even as a younger person, I find the latter part kind of messed up, personally.

Allegations of creating a Toxic Work-Environment

Back in 2021, the New York Times interviewed a handful of Mrbeast’s ex-employees, uncovering some allegedly unsavoury behaviour by the content creator. According to them, MrBeast behaves very differently when the camera isn’t rolling.

Matt Turner used to edit videos for MRBeast but claims he never was credited for his work. According to him, he’d ask for credit but MrBeast would credit someone else instead. On top of that, the YouTuber would insult and berate Turner daily, frequently using ableist slurs used to insult people with mental disabilities.

Nate Anderson, another of MrBeast’s editor, quit his job after just a week and posted a video titled “My Experience Editing for Mr. Beast (Worst week of My Life)” on YouTube. There, he explained the situation but after reportedly receiving death threats from enraged MrBeast fans, he decided to take down the video altogether.

The NYT spoke to a near-dozen ex-employees who had negative things to say about the YouTuber, ranging from lack of credit, unrealistic expectations, frequent verbal abuse, as well as frequent use of slurs. Some people have taken to YouTube and Twitter in the past, in an attempt to “expose” MrBeast but they’d often perform a 180-turn after receiving massive backlash for their comments, something I’ll get into later again.

His Appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast

In Early 2022, MrBeast was being criticized for going on Joe Rogan’s podcast, who is known for platforming guests who spread vaccine misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic and who’s gotten into a bunch of other controversies, particularly due to the rampant and frequent use of homophobic and misogynistic language as well as racial slurs, see here.

MrBeast joining Rogan for one podcast stirred up quite a bit of discourse back then… and honestly, I’m just not a fan of Rogan’s. When a guest appears there, I end up disliking them. When you’re high-profile, like MrBeast, you essentially support people like Joe Rogan by joining them on their cause – in this case, a platform where people like Peterson and Musk got to share their problematic ideas.

Supporting a cause like that doesn’t bode well for Donaldson’s views.

The Cryptocurrency Scandal

I’ll keep this simple: MrBeast’s known for charity work to save the climate… fishing plastic out of the ocean, planting trees, and all of that is great but back in 2021, Donaldson took interest in the NFT marketplace, “Refinable”, which then ended up causing a lot of people to get interested in it as well.

Consequently, Refinable began using Mrbeast’s interest in its marketing campaign which resulted in the coin launching with a value 25 times higher than expected.

It later crashed, though, being a crypto-scam and stuff, and a lot of people felt as if they’d been scammed… but that’s just the nature of Crypto.

Either way, Donaldson never went against the NFT site using his likeness for their marketing and appeared to have been fine with it. Dodgy.

The “Recreating Squid Game” Controversy

At last, about a year ago, Donaldson recreated scenes from Squid Game in real life pumping lots and lots of money into what essentially is incredibly upsetting and ironic.

The upsetting part is that this video apparently made more revenue than what the original Squid Game creator made at the time when he wrote the show, although I can’t seem to find the article on that anymore.

The ironic one is that MrBeast’s video is essentially playing right into the hands of what the show is originally trying to criticize: Rich People playing with the Lives of real humans. Sure, Donaldson’s video is non-lethal and a lot less elaborate but it still is quite odd for him to essentially recreate a version of Squid Game with lots of money just for the sake of doing it.

…at the same time, though, it doesn’t really matter whether or not MrBeast’s video earned more than the original creator’s whole show because the original creator of Squid Game is a cunt that plagiarized ideas from Gykakkyō Burai: Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor as well as Kami-sama no Iutoori.

Current Controversy

This kinda brings us to today where MrBeast is not doing much bad but he still gets into sticky situations.

Lies / “Curing the Blind”

The big issue that I personally see is something that Pete Gustin, a blind surfer who spreads a lot of awareness on what it’s like to be blind, talks about in this video right here.

MrBeast paid for 1,000 people’s cataract surgery. In the video, statements like “we cured a thousand blind people” are being used extensively to push this narrative that blindness is something that can be cured… but it’s not. MrBeast lied.

As Pete Gustin explains, cataracts are something you can develop that can be treated, as shown in the video, whereas actual blindness happens due to people’s cells in specific parts at the back of the eye dying. This still has no cure and there is still research going on for the sake of finding a cure to blindness.

Yet, now that MrBeast boldly exclaimed that he cured 1,000 people’s blindness, a lot of people will think that the aforementioned research isn’t needed anymore and thus, research funds will get lowered in the process because less people will give to charity.

Honestly, the big thing that I dislike about MrBeast’s video is that it’s so artificial and it feels staged even though there are real people with real issues here. The first thing that these people see in quite a while is a camera that is held to their face. One person also didn’t “see for the first time” in this video but rather “for the first time… in four months”. Again, not to play down sicknesses and issues that actual people have but I feel like this trivialized the term “blindness” and that’s an issue.

Poverty Porn, and Charity

As mentioned previously, the first thing these people see after their surgery is a fucking camera.

MrBeast’s videos have a tendency to go viral because MrBeast needs them to go viral. To do so, it aims to make you emotional by showing you sob stories and exploiting these people’s poverty and tragic backstories to get a shareable sob story, hence making him seem like a slim Superman.

It’s called Poverty Porn. It tugs at your heartstrings and tries to get you to feel sympathy for these people… but it’s so wild to me, honestly, that so few people see issues with it.

Whenever people criticize this aspect of Donaldson’s content, the fans jump into the discussion and start defending MrBeast manically, often resorting to death threats and verbal abuse in the process. Before I found out that Donaldson removed the tweets where he called others “fags”, I stumbled across hundreds of tweets where people have absolutely no qualms to call others “faggot”.

MrBeast doesn’t speak up against this sort of thing nor does he actively support it. It feels almost like a mix of Elon Musk and Dream, in terms of its fandom.

When you give people valid concerns, they’ll either attack you or they’ll list all the philanthropic work that this celebrity has done. It’s like defending the modern-day slavery and human rights violations in Qatar by stating that they’re creating “work opportunities” for impoverished countries. It’s almost cynical.

In one video, Mrbeast locked people into solitary confinement, a torture method. This sparked controversy for a few days but was immediately forgotten because the participants consented to it…

The issue I see, however, is that we don’t know whether these people were educated on the effects of solitary confinement, such as PTSD, depression, and even Suicide. We don’t know whether these people consented to this despite the risks because they were desperate for money… or whether they consented because they just weren’t made aware of why solitary confinement is considered torture.

Summary

Overall, I think the biggest problem with MrBeast is that he does spread awareness but a lot of the time, it’s just not enough. In this latest video, he claims to “cure the blind” but in reality, he helped pay for cataract surgery. It adds onto the confusion.

Instead of talking about the fact that it’s fucked up that people have to rely on the generosity of philanthropists to be able to afford surgeries like this, the focus of the video (at least to me) appears to be “hey, look, I’m a good guy and these people can now see again. All blind people can be cured!” – which is shady at best.

MrBeast is part of the problem, arguably, but instead of talking about how it shouldn’t be millionaires that feed the poor and fund surgeries, he’s… yeah.

I find this aspect dodgy, not to mention that the content is borderline gross in how it exploits the impoverished and weak. The thumbnails and general script are dreadful and I’m just not a fan of the content – but this post isn’t about the content. It’s about a human being spreading misinformation and being defended for it. If you dare attack MrBeast, you’ll get attacked by some kids on the internet.

And nobody seems to care at all about that, especially when videos like his “fishing plastic out of the ocean” project are sponsored by companies that are part of the problem, like Coca-Cola, one of the biggest sea polluters. The irony.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.