A year ago, YouTuber MrBeast started a spin-off channel called Beast Philanthropy, and according to the channel’s about page, 100 percent of the profits from its ad revenue, merch sales, and sponsorships go towards ‘making the world a better place’. Of course, he isn’t just doing this out of the kindness of his heart – everything is recorded and edited for content. It’s for clicks.Most recently, he posted a video titled ‘Giving 20,000 Shoes To Kids In Africa’ where he gave shoes made out of recycled plastic to children who needed shoes to walk to school. Apart from the fact that the video heavily reinforces colonialist stereotypes about Africa being impoverished and backward, it looks just like old-fashioned charity tourism from where I’m standing. A bunch of white men give a single pair of shoes to children – but when they outgrow them, what happens? They’ve partnered with a charity, but when the hype dies down and so do donations, what help can this charity hope to offer? It’s just another case of terribly mismanaged philanthropism, and worse, it was done to improve the MrBeast brand.Related: To Fight Fascism, Follow Yu-Gi-Oh!'s ExampleHe also posted a video misleadingly titled ‘1,000 Blind People See For The First Time’ where he paid for a thousand people to get cataract surgery, and gave them money on top of that. Cataracts are not the same as actual blindness, though they do cause visual impairment, and they often develop over time. Most of these people had vision for large parts of their lives – one even only had cataracts for four months. Of course, the fact that these people had access to surgery is amazing, but the fact that the first thing they saw after their surgery was a camera in their faces, recording one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, doesn’t sit right with me. Neither does MrBeast’s reaction to the criticism of this exploitation, where he expected adulation, and failed to see the inherent imbalance in a system he profits from.

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has made his career off attention-seeking stunts. At 13, he was speedrunning every YouTube trend in an attempt to go viral: commentating on YouTube drama, making compilations of Minecraft and Call of Duty highlights, and estimating YouTubers’ net worth. He started blowing up due to a series called ‘worst intros’, where he compiled and made fun of YouTuber introductions. In January 2017, Donaldson went viral for counting to 100,000. It took him 44 hours.

After four years of trying, he figured out how to game the algorithm, and once he started, he didn’t stop. He kept doing stunts – he spun a fidget spinner for 24 hours, watched Jake Paul’s It’s Everyday Bro for ten hours, said ‘Logan Paul’ 100,000 times, and tested if 100,000 pieces of paper could stop a bullet. (It can. In fact, it doesn’t even take nearly that many.)

MrBeast Shotgun
via YouTube

Eventually, he started making videos where he creates challenges whose winners take life-changing amounts of money home. Most recently, he lifted an entire house full of clothes and supplies into a plot of land and told a subscriber if he stayed there for a full 100 days, he could take home half a million dollars. Of course, he recorded the whole thing – the house was wired up with cameras, and the hundred days were edited into a 17-minute video for YouTube.

He’s offered people $100,000 to quit their job. He’s offered kids $100,000 to quit school (don’t worry, he said in the video he was actually only going to give them the money if they refused to quit). He put a cheque for a million dollars in a watermelon, hid it in a field full of watermelons, and told a man if he found the right one and smashed it, he could cash the cheque. He famously re-enacted Squid Game, the show where desperate people compete to the death for money – in his version, nobody died, but it was still in terrible taste.

Mr Beast Squid Game
via YouTube

What’s so disturbing about these videos is that Donaldson is still doing stunts – it’s just that now, other people are doing them for him. He got famous doing things that made him uncomfortable, pushed the bounds of what the human brain and body can tolerate, and now he’s outsourcing that to people in exchange for ludicrous amounts of money. It’s not out of morbid fascination with people’s limits based on his own experience, it’s for clicks.

He once said that after dropping out of college, he told his mother, “I’d rather be poor than do anything besides YouTube.” But he hasn’t had to choose – he’s gotten absolutely loaded making this content and optimising it for YouTube. I can’t imagine wanting so badly to be a YouTuber that I’d do this to other people – recognise that what I have is enough money to change someone’s life, and hold it over them so they’ll dance for the entertainment of millions of people on the internet. Perhaps it’s a result of growing up on the internet and seeing how rich and famous YouTubers at that time got, and wanting to emulate that. Donaldson is only 24 and, because of his videos, has already developed such a cult of personality around him that his fans are going to supermarkets to fix displays of his chocolate bars. He got what he wanted, and then wanted more.

mrbeast biting a feastables bar
via MrBeast

Combine all this with how Donaldson’s former employees described a toxic work environment, his use of slurs on Twitter, his being on Joe Rogan’s podcast (which certainly indicates something about his values), and that most of his charitable donations are essentially tax write-offs, it’s clear Donaldson should not be lauded as a hero the way many of his fans think. Despite criticism, he refuses to acknowledge the ramifications of his work, claiming instead that people will always find a way to criticise him despite his generosity.

It’s not a matter of being overly judgmental just because he’s rich – if Donaldson truly does give away all his money before he dies, at least some people will be the better for it. But he’s usually sponsored by brands to make his videos, essentially helping to launder those companies’ reputations, and realistically, he gets plenty of money from his multiple brands. My question is – if what he wants to do is help people, why does he have to record their suffering and post it for the world to see in order to do it? Without the videos to prove he did it, would he still do it?

Next: Starfield Can’t Just Be Another Fallout Or Skyrim