Former Twitch and current Kick streamer Adin Ross recently uploaded a YouTube video where he went on Omeagle and asked people to "act Black" for $100. When they would refuse, he'd up the amount to $200. When they'd eventually do it, he would then shout "Yo! You’re racist!" as if this was some big 'gotcha' moment. It shows that the current generation of streamers hasn't learned from the pitfalls of YouTube's 'social experiments', which were often racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or a combination of all three.
As reported by Dexerto, the infamous streamer uploaded the video to his YouTube channel on February 16. Titled 'i told strangers to act black for $100', it's just lacking the often memed (gone wrong!), (gone sexual!) suffixes.
The video is harmful because it pushes the idea that there's an inherent set of behaviours associated with race. One commenter on the video, Ujefaa Sama, wrote, "Acting black doesn’t exist, how does one act a colour, black isn’t even an ethnicity. You mean 'act like a thug', which isn’t all of us."
Videos like this, where rich influencers and content creators dangle money in front of people to act like idiots, showcase some of the worst in humanity. For many people, $200 is a life-changing amount of money, worth being seen as racist online for. If it means you can afford a suit for a job interview, or repair your car to go to work, or buy yourself or your child some medicine, there isn't much people won't do for that.
Ross' video most clearly resembles an old PewDiePie video where he commissioned people on Fiverr to hold up a sign that read "death to all Jews", something he later claimed was a thought experiment about what people were willing to do for money on digital marketplaces. It was a stupid thing to do then, and it's a stupid thing to do now.
These types of experiments just prove what we all already know: people are desperate for money. That isn't news, and the YouTubers and streamers who make money from these kinds of videos don't then go and lobby for higher minimum wages or stronger worker protection rights, they just move on to the next piece of content.
On the other side of this spectrum we have people like Mr Beast, who recently came under fire for a video where he paid to have 1,000 people's blindness cured. While on the surface it's a nice gesture, and he claims to be raising awareness of how many people we could help if the money was invested in doing so, the bottom line is that he does it to make money for himself.
While the people who feature in Mr Beasts videos will benefit, his money could be used to help so many more, without parading them around for entertainment. On both ends of the spectrum, we see poor people exploited for the benefit of rich streamers and content creators, and it's a damn shame the new generation has learned nothing from the previous one's mistakes.