site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

14
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Mr Beast’s Trans Debacle

Mr Beast is the Gen Z entertainment celebrity of note. Calling Mr Beast the PewDiePie of Gen Z would be underselling him. His 25-minute Squid Game YouTube video received 400 million views, which to put in perspective is 5x the total viewership of the Seinfeld Finale. His Tik Tok has 80 million followers, his most popular “YouTube short” has 650 million views, etc. He is more popular than what the average millennial or older would think (I fall into this cohort). When he visited a mall in my state to sell his burgers (one of his successful business offshoots), the line extended miles and made the news. Mr Beast has a childhood friend group with whom he makes videos. The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success. They were, like many friend groups containing boys in America[*], all male; the pure boyishness was a major draw for his success.

This year, one of the “cast” members of the Mr Beast enterprise transitioned into a woman. (For brevity, I will just call the member she and a woman.) Chris, who had a child and went through a divorce, has transitioned in full. She is wearing dresses on video and taking HRT. If you were to plug Chris and Mr Beast into Google News, you would have no idea how the viewers have responded to this change. But plugging it into Tik Tok (the premiere Zoomer app) gives a different story.

The response among Gen Z has been overwhelmingly negative. When I checked last night, 8 of the 10 most watched videos for the search “Mr Beast” were a negative reaction to Chris’s transition, the total view count of which was more than 80 million. The comments overwhelmingly negative. A typical comment section looked like this, sometimes with more than 25k comments. The commenters chant “Mr Beast 6000 coming out”, referencing Mr Beast’s oldest YouTube channel known for political incorrect humor. The consensus among the fans is that the transition has ruined the group’s rapport and that Chris has got to go, but that hands are tied because she is transgender. On the latest (secondary channel) video for Mr Beast, the comment section is censored and moderated so that the issue can’t explicitly come up. The commenters instead spam “we want to see more Chandler and Nolan”, cleverly emphasizing their disinterest with Chris by omission. The fans on Tik Tok are trying to find any clip they can to get Chris cancelled, with one finding a video of him saying the N word and another digging up an anti-Islam tweet from 2017.

There are a few things to explore here.

  1. Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.

  2. The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.

  3. Mr Beast is in a pickle. He became popular, partially, because of the authenticity and joy of his friend group. The discomfort involving the transition is palpable in the latest video. Body language, rapport, banter, and general “vibes” have ruined what led children to watch his content. He is the most data driven creator and knows this. He has previously mentioned that he edits out sneezes and coughs because it loses retention, and I believe once mentioned that adding a girl to reaction videos negatively reduces engagement. Alas, he can’t come out and fire the transitioned member without losing corporate sponsorship and reputation. He is stuck between losing popularity among his fans, or losing support among the progressive power structure. He is also losing support from parents who don’t want their 8-year-old watching a transgender. There’s also the moral issue of supporting a friend post-divorce.

New datapoint : This video titled "Why Chris Will Soon Be A Nightmare For MrBeast" from internet drama chronicler SunnyV2 was released recently and quickly rocketed to 1 million views in half a day, basically making the same argument that it seems to have affected the dynamic and split the fanbase. The reaction in the top Youtube comments has been broadly negative about Sunny's characterisation and defending Jimmy and Chris.

MrBeast himself came out attacking the title and defending his friend.

Yeah it seems like this video drew the ire of the entire YT LGBT community on Twitter too. Now you have every major streamer talking about it (XQC, Ludwig). This pretty much seals the deal for Mr Beast keeping Chris on board.

It's truly hard to get past the gross attention seeking behavior a lot of highly visible transitions involve. Maybe it's just because a lot of women go through a lot of gross attention seeking behavior online, and it's extra gross seeing men try to get in on it too. The passive aggressive fishing for complements. The feigning of having no agency what so ever. E-girls are the height of parasocial degeneracy, and seeing a man decide to become an e-girl pings an enormous high disgust/cringe reaction for me.

Browsing a few pages of twitter I'd say its 15% supportive 85% "they look so uncomfortable" "how could he do this to his family" etc.

Browsing a few pages of twitter I'd say its 15% supportive 85% "they look so uncomfortable" "how could he do this to his family" etc.

I searched "MrBeast Chris" on the Latest tab and I'd say more like 5%/95%. I'm shocked there's no immune response yet. Usually when a transphobia-inspiring event breaks on social media, the trans-rights side of things quickly mobilizes and swarms over the field of battle. They care more.

I suspect that, at the moment, the trans-rights warriors are spread too thin. The entire past four months has felt pretty non-stop on trans-related drama, so they genuinely might be too exhausted to muster the Extremely Online energy for this at the moment. There's apparently people still mad over VTubers WRT Hogwarts Legacy, and it's been nearly two months since that game came out. Add on smaller events like Keffals apparently deciding to flounce on politics, and bigger events like Nashville (side note, surprised the whole "Transgression" thing, where apparently people stormed a state capitol, went without note on this site), and I suspect the end result is that it's all too much for the modal online transperson or trans ally.

The one big 'weakness' of swarm tactics is that they can generally only focus on a 1-2 targets at once.

I've noticed that this is the 'rate limiter' for cancel culture, you can only cancel like a couple people a week at most, since that's all you can get a mob of people to focus on for very long. Perhaps not counting cancelling whole groups all at once.

Can someone link the actual tiktok videos? Searching without an account doesn't give you videos but channels.

I’ve been in MB’s position, and that discomfort is all too relatable.

I was torn. I felt like I should act as if nothing had changed - this was still the same fundamental person; it’d be offensive to treat them differently. On the other hand, I felt like I SHOULD treat them differently. They obviously wanted to be seen as an attractive young woman – shouldn’t I treat them like one?

But there are things I’d say and do around men that I’d never say or do around women. If I kept saying and doing them, I’d be acknowledging that I didn’t see the person as a woman. But if I didn’t say them, I’d be tacitly acknowledging that our relationship had fundamentally and irrevocably changed. And if it had – well, wouldn’t I need to re-evaluate whether I wanted to hang out with the new person?

There was also the appalling mismatch between how the person clearly wanted to be viewed (hot woman), and the fact I couldn’t help but see them as a man in a wig and dress. I wanted to be supportive, but that required me to put on an act I didn’t believe in, that was unnatural and grating to maintain.

I suspect this is the reality for many people, and that Mr.Beast's reaction isn't abnormal. There's a dearth of popular narratives, real or fictional, exploring the messy reality of what it's like to have someone close to you transition. Maybe this will help that narrative get a spotlight, and discussion.

But there are things I’d say and do around men that I’d never say or do around women.

I think this is actually a core worldview difference here. I'm well aware that people act differently in single-gender vs. mixed-gender spaces, and in my teens and early 20s actively avoided being in male-only spaces because there's a subset of men that act like assholes in male-only spaces. I'm not entirely certain if I've stopped encountering that due to selecting friends better, older people just being more mature, or just rarely finding myself in male-only groups, partially because essentially all of my socializing is now in explicitly queer-accepting or queer-normative spaces.

The idea of anyone I know acting differently purely based on the gender distribution of the group they're in, strikes me as strange. Sure there's significant personality differences based on the size of the group and awareness of sensitivities of certain individuals (e.g. not making sexual comments around prudish people). But as I said, I also mostly socialize in queer spaces where gender is naturally going to be treated differently.

I think this is actually a core worldview difference here.

I am not the person you responded to but I think this must be true, the groups you sound like you prefer sound like a nightmare I'd run from. They sound like female dominated groups that have always been incredibly exhausting to be around for me. The dynamics are incredibly different and it really sounds like there is an entire experience that you have managed to never have in male only socialization.

The idea of anyone I know acting differently purely based on the gender distribution of the group they're in, strikes me as strange. Sure there's significant personality differences based on the size of the group and awareness of sensitivities of certain individuals (e.g. not making sexual comments around prudish people). But as I said, I also mostly socialize in queer spaces where gender is naturally going to be treated differently.

Gender is an useful estimation of the sensitivities of individuals. If I'm in an all male group, I'd be careful about making an off-colour jokes and slowly dip my toes into dark humour. Because those jokes can make people laugh the most and get the best reaction, but could also cause a really bad reaction. If I'm in an all female group, I probably wouldn't even try. There are some girls who are as fine as any guy with off-colour humour, but if you take a group of ~6 random girls, there'd almost certainly be at least one who'd be deeply offended.

But if you treat groups differently based on whether they are male by sex VS male by gender, isn’t that an admission that trans men are in some fundamental way different in personality than natal men?

I'm not sure how you got that from my comment. But also, I don't think I knew any (out) trans people before my mid-20s, so I can't make any strong claims about how I would have acted around them at that time.

The idea of anyone I know acting differently purely based on the gender distribution of the group they're in, strikes me as strange.

Do you act differently to people you find attractive?

If by "find attractive" you mean the extreme of "have a crush on", then yeah. Mostly along the lines of being super-shy if it's someone I'm both very attracted to and don't know very well or if I know them better probably less shy and more just trying too hard to impress them in stupid ways. I don't think anyone enjoys being around people who are acting infatuated, though. And that doesn't exactly come up a lot, especially if hanging out with more or less the same friends group (and as I'm no longer an adolescent with raging hormones, those emotions are probably just less strong when they do happen, although one of those examples of me acting like an infatuated idiot happened in the past month...). Also, I'm not going to claim to be immune to the halo effect, so I probably act differently around people I find attractive in ways that I don't notice.

... but I'm not quite sure what the point you're making is.

They obviously wanted to be seen as an attractive young woman – shouldn’t I treat them like one?

Should people be treated as what they'd like to be seen as rather than what they are? Setting aside whether trans women are women, someone that has recently transitioned and isn't even in the ballpark of passing as a woman, much less an attractive one, should not have a reasonable expectation that people will immediately begin pretending that they're attractive as women. Someone that looks like Chris will only be attractive to a specific sort of fetishist, not to a straight male with normal tastes in women.

I can't imagine applying this level of reality distortion field to any other expressed preference. It's trite to bring up examples like, "well, what if someone wanted to be treated as Napoleon?", but that really is the level of dissonance that I experience when a pretty obvious guy in a wig wants to be treated as an attractive woman. Regardless of what their internal experience is, that simply isn't what my eyes see and I don't buy that it's what anyone else is seeing either.

I think it’s good to make some accommodation for others’ worldviews. To gently prod at another preference, consider others’ religion/lack thereof. All but your own will seem laughably absurd. Yet if I was invited to dinner by devout Zoroastrians, I wouldn’t laugh in their faces when they suggested we say a prayer before dinner, nor would I immediately start attacking the holes in their holy book. When a belief seems delusional to you, but is important to someone else, then provided it isn’t causing any real harm, I think you can make accommodations. It’s pretty well impossible to have relationships with people otherwise.

On the other hand, maybe this kind of thinking has landed us in our current predicament? If we were all completely open about calling out what we see as insane, then maybe silly belief structures would find it harder to take root. It’d probably be a society with far more hatred and conflict, though, so I don’t know if the tradeoff is worth it.

There are gradations too, with acting around trans women. It’s one thing to accommodate saying ‘she’ and ‘her’, another to point-blank lie when asked “do you think I’m attractive,” and another entirely to agree to join them in the bedroom so as to maintain the fiction.

All up, provided a transwoman isn’t obnoxious about the whole thing, I feel it’s needlessly demeaning and rude not to do the bare minimum along with it. At the same time, there are limits to what I’ll do.

I think the core conflict here is at what level does self-perception trump others' observed reality?

If someone fancies themselves a genius but struggles with simple maths and spelling, we do not humour them. Their identity as a genius is not to be respected. Other people's labels trump your own. So too with attractiveness. Some professions even have titles that are legally protected in some places -- calling yourself an engineer or a doctor when you aren't one can actually get you in trouble.

It seems to me that the trans issue is almost the only one where self-perception is expected to trump others' observations of you. You can't declare yourself cool, or force a nickname for yourself, or anything like that. But you can declare yourself a woman? I don't buy it. And I don't think trans do either, given their constant insistence on everyone else "validating" them. They know that identities are not really determined by the individual, hence the attempt to force others to perceive them they way they wish to be perceived.

Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days

That hasn't been my impression? The nazi tiktokkers I'm aware of regularly get banned, even among regular users there are many spelling tweaks to avoid censorship (eg "sex" -> "seggs"), and complaints about random bans are common. Even before Musk, but especially after, Twitter is either as or more permissive. I don't use tiktok much so could be wrong.

You're correct with regards to TikTok's content moderation. It's more willing to serve you extremist content than current-day YouTube, but much more moderated than Elon Musk's Twitter. The posts linked are possibly only still up because the algorithm and human moderators aren't looking at MrBeast content with as much scrutiny as they are at Little Dark Age Hyperborean edits.

Still, it's interesting to see the posts up with that many likes. Usually the ban threshold for content like that is tripped before a post or account gets too big. Maybe there weren't enough user reports to flag them?

Calling Mr Beast the PewDiePie of Gen Z would be underselling him.

Uh, wasn't PewDiePie the PewDiePie of Gen Z? I'm a fairly young millennial and he was definitely after my time.

PewDiePie

Some quick googling finds that Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (are the Swedes kidding me?) is 33 years of age. Like us, he is a millennial boomer.

And Mr. Beast is 24, I suppose it's possible that the OP was referring to the age of the content creator rather than their audience but I find that a strange way to read it.

Creators with younger audiences is pretty common. Dare I say baseline? PewDiePie entertained people a decade younger and so it goes.

He is but most of our cultural icons are older, no? I'm only a few years older than he is and most of the celebrities from when I was in middle school/high school are either over 50 or damn close. The only exception would be for people who make content directed at adults who can be of any age, but they're not normally associated with generations, either. Adam Ragusea, Glen and Friends, and Ethan Chebolowski are each at least a decade apart but make cooking videos for roughly the same audience. Joshua Weismann is probably younger and makes cooking videos that are unwatchable to anyone who isn't a zoomer.

Ethan is 29, while Joshua is 27. I think the big difference is in the approach to monetization. The three channels you mentioned feel like they rely on long-term subs more than they rely on viral clicks. You can see it in Adam's pivoting away from recipes towards general edutainment around health and nutrition: he's shown most of the recipes he knew or cared about, so he would have to switch to trying random memey recipes if he stuck to cooking. Joshua is all about memey recipes with his "but X" series, which probably tickle the algorithm much better.

The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.

The polling does not bear this out at all.

Britain: https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/ai3h3xvf7o/Transgender%20data%202020.pdf 18-24 range consistently most pro-trans, though margins aren't huge between them and the 25-49 group.

US: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues Same thing here, 18-29 group most liberal.

Unless you're going to say that for some obscure reason the Gen Z kids not yet of the age to be polled wildly diverge from the clear trend observable in the current data, and in that case you'd need much better evidence than reading comments on social media.

The problem seems to be the term Gen-Z in this case. They are not the demographic for Mr Beast. The kids who watch him are closer to 12-13 yo, a new, as yet unnamed demographic. I say this as apparent of children in both age groups and my personal experiences with their viewing tastes.

My priors are distinctly that on the trans issue, as on the abortion issue, there is a lot less gap between the two sides than they both say there is, and that most ‘pro-trans’ wish there would be less of it while not actually believing in the gender narrative, while most ‘anti-trans’ really don’t support bigotry.

I would argue that, for convoluted reasons, YouGov and Pew polling is going to select for people who have the time and desire to express their views on social issues, which is going to lean Left. Maybe this is not true though. Mr Beast’s Tik Tok demographic is probably more 12-18 than 18-24 though.

Pollsters are not idiots, they know that such biases can enter polling data, and whether you think their particular methods yield and accurate sample or not it's a damn sight better than picking social media comments at random.

You say this like it would make it less likely that pollsters would publish results that are out of line with reality depending on what the people commissioning the poll would like to see?

We are firmly in isolated demand for rigour territory here. Mainstream polls are suddenly not reliable because of some vague and unsubstantiated accusation of bias, but picking comments on social media at random is somehow an acceptable basis on which to assess public opinion.

No polls have ever been reliable -- pollsters are motivated to please the people writing their cheques, not to provide an accurate picture of reality. It's propaganda all the way down.

Right, no doubt it's pure coincidence that the RCP average for 2022 generic ballot polls was R +2.5 and the real margin was R +2.8. Those pollsters sure were lucky that their commissioned propaganda happened to average out to an accurate picture of public opinion.

Your comment is just vague and meaningless drivel. If you have a problem with the methodology, make a real and specific criticism not this borderline unfalsifiable crap.

That will happen when you average a group of polls with varying goals -- it might even be an OK way to get valid results! It is not evidence that individual polls are reliable.

Might as well can the snide abuse if you want to keep talking -- my comments have clear meaning, you just disagree.

More comments

This is not something you have argued in any capacity, you are simply asserting it

Well that's what they say they do.

https://www.pewresearch.org/our-methods/u-s-surveys/u-s-survey-methodology/

Of course one can debate how well they do it, but simply saying 'poll respondents aren't representative' isn't a particularly insightful point.

Sure - but they certainly have the same biases as the media, PMC, cathedral, etc. Do you think they would publish a poll that resoundly rejects the trans narrative? I'm not even suggesting that they do this consciously. Similar to the experts who were dictating COVID science, I think they respond to incentives and believe the bullshit theyre slinging is the best answer. Best, of course, is not synonymous with a accurate description of reality.

If as you say you're not alleging some genuine conspiracy to falsify results, then what's the mechanism here for how a liberal bias gets into the results?

I'm happy to allege all sorts of conspiracies, but the classical way of not doing so is to just invoke bias as a psychological mechanism. You see results you agree with, you hit "send", you see results you disagree with, you put extra scrutiny on it. If everybody around you shares the same values, no one needs to conspire, you will get biased results just by people following their vibes.

They do publish results that show 'victories' for the socially conservative side all the time though. In fact, in a lot of those polls the younger generation are the outliers and the overall results on a number of question show the trans-sceptical side having more support. In the YouGov poll for instance, there was a comfortable plurality against allowing trans women in women's sports, while in the Pew poll there was a narrow plurality in favour of the view that trans acceptance had 'gone too far' against having 'not gone far enough' and a comfortable majority in favour of the view that 'whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by sex at birth'. Plus, pollsters run by right-wingers like Rasmussen don't find terribly different results to the mainstream pollsters.

In any case, the original claim about attitudes towards Gen Z on trans issues was a relative one, and I find it hard to envisage the scenario under which the liberal bias of mainstream pollsters only affects the results of one age cohort.

Tiktok videos regarding something only tell you about the people who cared enough to make or watch Tiktok videos about that thing. Not only is counting Tiktok videos about some specific event much less rigorous than a poll, but it isn't even really trying to do the same thing as an opinion poll. I think the better explanation would be that, as my comment below suggests, there is greater polarization. India has more passionate anti-Hinduism than the vast majority of countries, a Youtube video about Hindu atrocities would presumably do better there than America. That doesn't call into question the statistics saying India is 80% Hindu.

On the day specified, probably everyone who follows and engaged with Mr Beast content on Tik Tok saw those videos. It’s not “passionate anti-trans community boosts message to the top”, far from it. The videos were tagged Chris and Mr Beast, they showed the “characters”, that’s what rose to the top for the entire MB community and is the most important thing they wanted to Tok about. The median Mr Beast fan must have engaged with it and liked it to some degree. Per your example, if something happened to a Hindu in India, pro-Hindu content would flood to the top of the tag “Hindu” and overpower any anti-Hindu sentiments. You might still see anti-Hindu content somewhere, but not at the top, somewhere lower.

YouGov is inferior for an obvious reason. YouGov puts their “ads” on random websites and expects people to answer the poll. This select for, how do I put this, very dumb obedient people. It also selects for a decidedly non-median zoomer, because Zoomers don’t spend time wiggling around on websites, they spend their time on platforms. They use Tik Tok as their version of Google, for instance. And frankly, what weirdo would answer polling questions on a random website from a sidebar ad or pop up? Pew Polling similarly skews the results, because Zoomers don’t answer random phone calls, mail in surveys, or emails.

Tik Tok is the default place they hang out online, they self-select their interests, and they vote their interests to the top. Unlike a Reddit, being “early” on voting has no effect. So after a day, you get polling from all the Zoomers who opened Tik Tok that day and self-selected for Mr Beast. The videos must have been liked and high engagement to rise to the top of that tag. Even better, it’s anonymous.

YouGov is inferior for an obvious reason. YouGov puts their “ads” on random websites and expects people to answer the poll.

I don't think this is how they do they do their specific polls on more serious issues. In any case, they have a proven track record of doing pretty well in the only instances where their results are actually testable, in elections.

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/2uo7zs3zo8/Record_of_Accuracy_YG_w.pdf

Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform...

I (think) the point is that, for things like polls, there is a thumb on the scale. That Tiktok is actually showing a more accurate representation of people views...

That's a pretty silly contention if so; however imperfect, a poll which at least attempts to sample a representative cross-section of the nation could hardly have a 'thumb on the scale' to a greater extent that randomly sampling Tiktok comments hither and thither.

a poll which at least attempts to sample a representative cross-section...

Sure, but if you pick you sample in a biased manner you are putting your thumb on the scale. Just look at the twitter leaks... certain views were pushed.

Even if you don't believe that, it becomes obvious when you compare those results to something more open (i.e. tiktok).

Granted, you can say tiktok isn't more open but I don't think it's fair to call the contention silly.

Unless you’re talking about two completely different demographics. Gen-Z doesn’t watch Mr Beast.

Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.

Why should we believe that TikTok, the platform known for going 110% in on "the algorithm", is showing us what is representative of the real world? Especially given that emphasizing polarization is exactly the sort of thing we worry that (foreign adversary) social networks would do.

Of course, teenagers are really difficult to survey, so I don't have a good way to get data, and TikTok might be the best we have.

"Immunized" is taking it much too far given how the percentage of teenagers who identify as trans/non-binary/etc. has exploded. And I would guess that, by most measures, their net positions on trans issues are more pro-trans as well. Rather I would say that they are much more polarized due to the increased salience of transgenderism and transgender ideology.

If your contact with the concept of transgenderism is learning that the T in LGBT refers to crossdressers and once hearing a joke about thai ladyboys, you are likely to be tolerant and not care about weirdos doing weirdo things. If instead it is seeing a whole friend group at school trying to convince a member that he's trans/non-binary because he has long hair and isn't masculine enough, or seeing an attention-seeking person go trans and police "misgendering", or encountering the trans part of the online SJW community, or seeing public figures like Cosmo/Narcissa and Jim Sterling blow up their lives, or at least hearing about it in the media with the constant drumbeat of pro-trans rhetoric and with news stories like MTFs competing in women's sports, you are going to approach the issue in a different way.

or seeing public figures like [..] Jim Sterling blow up their lives

Good god, what did that toxic narcissist do now? I've never seen someone take being a shitbag "ironically" so far for so long with nearly nobody calling them out on it.

I haven't followed him closely, I mostly just heard about how he has lost so many viewers and subscribers that he did a "Under 800k Subscriber Special" (and previously did a "Under 900k" one) in which he apparently blames transphobia and claims Youtube suppresses LGBT content. I also heard that his wife left him. (Supposedly he has said that she decided to leave him for another guy. I know they were already in an open relationship before the trans stuff but I don't know what role either that or the trans stuff might have played.) A quick search finds this thread discussing the channel decline. Hurting his Youtuber career and losing his wife isn't as bad as Cosmo/Narcissa's degeneration and he still makes good money on Patreon, so maybe saying "blow up" was going too far. But I remember when he was a big mainstream gaming personality who was incidentally a SJW, and now I get the impression that it has consumed his whole self-conception and narrative of his life while leading him to do self-destructive things.

A quick search finds this thread discussing the channel decline.

Yeah, I guess that's kinda it for Sterling's career unless she does some radical changes.

Good god, what did that toxic narcissist do now?

It's Stephanie Sterling now.

Seeing TikToks with likes in the hundreds of thousands lamenting Chris' transition or gleefully noting MrBeast's obvious discomfort with his lifelong friend in their recent video is quite the vibe shift. I'm not sure what's more surprising to me — the reaction itself or it being allowed to exist on a big platform. The censorship of the last 5 years has become so normalized to me that I'm taken aback when I see genuine anti-trans posts break 100,000 impressions without being mopped.

As for the reaction, as others have noted, millions of zoomers have a strong parasocial relationship with this band of male friends. Chris' transition and the awkwardness it injects into their dynamic is palpable. These people may not be anti-trans, but they certainly don't like what transitioning has done to their favorite creator's content. For many people whose exposure to transgenderism has been filtered through sympathetic lenses — popular media or news about transgender oppression — this may be their first genuine glimpse at the uglier side of it.

Chris was a well-adjusted chad who had a wife and infant child, and broke it off to become this. Many 20-something men would literally kill to have half of what Chris had— looks, respect, wife, and child. If throwing those things away to start HRT and live as a woman is what makes Chris happy, then for many it may for the first time really call into question how far their preferences differ from the cultural values that produced this outcome.

I don't really buy into there being a corrective "pendulum" when it comes to most progressive positions, but with the trans stuff it really feels like people are getting sick of it. Recently it feels like every week there is some new story that comes off quite badly for transpeople. The shooter targeting Christian children highlighting the militant anger of many transpeople (no demo fedposts online harder than they do), Dylan Mulvaney going mainstream/being sponsored by an all-American beer brand, and now this.

If you're a normal person growing up in America your default social position is likely live and let live. The tales you grew up reading and watching promote understanding, tolerance, and not jumping to conclusions with regards to unfamiliar cultures or lifestyles. The villains in your childhood tales are the intolerant, traditional, and quick to judge. Many are inclined to apply this rule to transgender people, and it is easy to say at a distance. It's someone else's life, let them live it how they want since it doesn't' affect me.

This isn't a bad rule to live by compared to many others. But it doesn't always play out as well as in the stories and many are beginning to realize that. Many who are fine in theory with transgenderism don't want to see it pushed in their media, for example. Pushing it to children is a bridge too far for many. It wouldn't be so bad if it just meant that your daughter cut her hair like a boy and grew out of it in a few years, but that practice may lead her to being pushed towards a suite of medical interventions that you can't take back. If tolerance means letting activists evangelize irreversible chemical treatment to minors, to your kids, over platforms like discord that you may not fully understand?

At that point, you might be fine becoming the villain. As Huck Finn said:

"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up."

...

That feels like where the post should end, but I said that I was surprised that the "MrBeast 6000" TikToks were allowed to stay up this long. I want to talk more about the platforms, but it feels like it belongs to a different post. Musk buying Twitter feels like a big narrative break. It's the wild west on there once again with accounts being restored and allowed to say things that would have been an instant ban anytime in the last 5 years. The Twitter Files show that much of the online consensus of the last five years was enforced from the top down by federal agents working closely with private institutions.

It makes me wonder what the cultural landscape would look like if not for the top-down smothering of right-wing content. What would Adult Swim look like had they not followed external pressure to cancel MDE's World Peace and Sam Hyde had been given access to that audience for years? Hell, what would Reddit look like if it hadn't nuked the growing far-right subreddit dedicated to the same show, or pulled out all the stops to block /r/theDonald's expansion?

If you look at the Twitch debate scene, it's almost all between varying shades of liberalism and leftism. This isn't necessarily due to these views being more popular, but by who has been allowed to grow their platform without interference. Hasan Piker is allowed to have sponsorships and remain on Twitch despite his views being as radical as Sam Hyde's. The smothering of right-leaning content is artificial and enforced by pulling levers from the top down. But there is a genuine market for it and the people who can articulate conservative thoughts in an interesting way, and it's been suppressed for years. If one side has corporate approval and the other side gets blocked from payment processors, of course there is going to be a disparity in whose ideas are currently more popular. There are many ideas that would sweep through the mainstream if they weren't constantly pulled out by the root.

Activists know this which is why the knives have been out for Musk since the purchase went through. Substack seems to be in the crosshairs as well now. I can't blame the activists for doing this; they understand how power works and are willing to use it to prevent competing power structures from taking hold. Who knows who will come out on top in the end? Smart money may be on Musk being forced to fold, but he seems quite sick of being told what to do by them and may stick to his ideals. If so, I wonder what things will look like 10 years from now.

I don't really buy into there being a corrective "pendulum" when it comes to most progressive positions, but with the trans stuff it really feels like people are getting sick of it. Recently it feels like every week there is some new story that comes off quite badly for transpeople. The shooter targeting Christian children highlighting the militant anger of many transpeople (no demo fedposts online harder than they do), Dylan Mulvaney going mainstream/being sponsored by an all-American beer brand, and now this.

Every year, there are a thousand 'controversial news stories'. Let's say a third of them are progressive, and a third of them are conservative. If you mostly look at the conservative ones, it's easy to think 'every week, there's some new story that comes off quite badly for <my side's issue>'. And let's say 3% of the population switches teams per year, 1.5% left to right and 1.5% the reverse. It's easy to observe a steady stream of people entering your group, or public conversions, and think that 'people are becoming more conservative'. But, of course, these coexist with the other direction - tons of stories about ebil transphobes or conservatives becoming progressives.

So, yeah, dylan mulvaney, trans shooter, trans chris. But there's also homophobic shootings, saudi oligarch kidnaps trans daughter from US, trans daughter commits suicide, big protest at tennesse capitol about transphobia, etc.

That feels like where the post should end, but I said that I was surprised that the "MrBeast 6000" TikToks were allowed to stay up this long

social media censorship has always been incredibly inconsistent and poorly-run!

For the twitch debate scene - like 50% chance i'm wrong here but iirc Twitch censors right-leaning views way more than other platforms. There are a lot of very popula conservative debaters and video essayists on youtube.

I'm not sure what's more surprising to me — the reaction itself or it being allowed to exist on a big platform.

..it's a chinese platform. Their algorithm.

Could be they are engineering a vibe shift.

Would be odd for Leninists, I guess.

Their content moderation team in the U.S. market is based in California and will promote and censor things in accordance with Californian values. I've followed conservative accounts on there that kept getting banned whenever they hit a certain follower threshold. On the other hand, their site recently highlighted several trans creators to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility.

From the second link:

Working with me and my team throughout this process will be an outstanding group from the global law firm K&L Gates LLP, including former Congressmen Bart Gordon and Jeff Denham, who bring excellent expertise in the technology sector. The external team that we've brought on for this project will collaborate with our internal US management team to work on several key initiatives:

-Create a committee of outside experts to advise on and review content moderation policies covering a wide range of topics, including child safety, hate speech, misinformation, bullying, and other potential issues.

In its domestic market China has a much tighter leash on what TikTok can show its users, of course, but in America TikTok's social positions are the standard progressivism you will see promoted by any other major American company. If China is putting its thumb on the scale for the U.S. moderation team to engineer American social discord, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the chaos created by Musk simply halting most censorship on Twitter.

and will promote and censor things in accordance with Californian values.

The old Chinese joke about 'Cultural Revolution now being in America' comes to mind.

They probably think they can't make it any worse, is my guess.

chaos created by Musk simply halting most censorship on Twitter.

The kind of 'chaos' created by Twitter is no longer more censorious against people who aren't seriously left-wing is the desirable kind of chaos. You want that.

Perhaps the Chinese learned from the French, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

I once was in a Philosophy class with a (female) teacher who brought up trans children as an example of a social issue worth considering the pros and cons. It was fairly relevant to the course content, I remember.

There was more negativity than I expected but there definitely seemed to be a gender divide. The men were mostly against it but gave their opposition in a muted, lukewarm way. I pointed out that we live in Australia where, in most states, it's a criminal offence for people to give a tattoo to someone under 18. On the basis of consistency alone, I implied trans kids should not be a thing. The teacher indicated that it could be reversed later on, which is technically true I guess. Some things can be reversed, at a certain cost in time and pain and energy and lessened development. Tattoos can also be reversed, though it's not easy or cheap. I got the impression that she was in favour, though unwilling to abandon objectivity. The others who supported it tended to be female.

If you look at the Twitch debate scene

Zizek-I-would-prefer-not-to-Tshirt.jpeg

Twitch is where Vaush came from. Somehow this guy has a position of influence, despite being incredibly cretinous.

He reasons about real life violence from Marvel movies: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kVuqXQYwD30

He backflipped from 'rape and sexual assault of women is such an important, underappreciated issue that society tragically ignores' to 'bullshit, she's lying, Muslims would never rape white women in Australia' in real time. This isn't just standard politician inconsistency but completely refusing to believe evidence after it disfavours his cause - in a matter of seconds.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mhZ0JqQOsDA (broken link, can't seem to find the original again)

Twitch and streaming generally has been an absolute disaster for political commentary.

The last video you linked is showing as private to me.

It was probably the same video as discussed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TimDillon/comments/vzuhtk/vaush_is_a_sociopath/

I'll transcribe (most) of it for sake of discussion:


Vaush is commenting on a video of a group of women talking their experience with sexual assault.

Vaush: “Do you think it speaks to the fact that we have a rape culture, when we put six women in a room to talk about #MeToo and they've all been raped and they all can barely choke out a coherent sentence. Do we think this perhaps maybe slightly speaks to the fact that there is a problem? [..] Almost every female friend I have has been the recipient of sexual assault or violence or rape or whatever at some point in their lives. It's such a common thing. 1 in 4 is probably understating it significantly. I wouldn't be surprised if the rate for sexual assault on women over one's lifetime is as high as 1 in 3 or 1 in 2, we just don't know, because nobody fucking reports! Because reports aren't being taken seriously! That's what #MeToo is about.”

Woman on the video: “...but things impact you in bizarre ways. Because the perpetrator wasn't white, and because he was part of a certain religion...”

Vaush: “Wait. Are we being real?”

Woman: ”And the police were basically like, we can't, because of cultural differences, which I don't feel like is such a great...”

Vaush: “What? Bullshit! Are you fucking kidding me? Did she turn her fucking rape confession into how the rape-fugees fucking Ahmed and Mohammed raped her and the police were like, uh, we can't prosecute brown people. Bullshit! Bullshit!”


In his defense, he didn't say he thought the woman was lying, or that Muslims never rape white women, but he said that connecting her rape story to refugees/Muslims was “bullshit”. I do agree he is hypocritical, but that's because apparently he doesn't want people talking about rape at the hands of Muslim immigrants, even when it was allegedly grounds for the police to dismiss her report, but presumably he would have had no problem if she had described her abuser as a Catholic priest, or a native white man, or any other group that is deemed okay to hate, even if it's not relevant to the story.

I've not watch all that much vaush, only more than a couple minutes linked form elsewhere on one occasion and I got the impression he was attempting to hypnotize me, he has a way of just repeating the same basic assertion in tons of different ways over and over again and just strongly implying this is making his argument more robust and not just more repeated.

Oh, I copied it from an older comment where I said the same thing.

I had a good friend transition. The early transition phase is difficult and she dealt with it by dressing very androgynously and not really wearing makeup in public until she had been on hormones for a while. She eventually got to the point where she'd get kicked out of men's rooms wearing jeans and a t-shirt and then she said fuck it and started wearing dresses and makeup publicly.

The early transition fashion/makeup phase is really awkward and there were definitely times when it was kind of weird that she would show up to a board game night in heavy makeup and a nice dress. The voice took a while getting used to and was weird at first. But it's been four or five years later she dresses pretty conventionally and things feel normal. I'm really glad there weren't cameras on me at all times and an obsessive fanbase analyzing me for any signs of awkwardness or discomfort, cause there were times when it was weird. But it doesn't feel weird anymore. There wasn't some profound personality change, socializing with her doesn't feel that different. Plus she's still a killer bass player.

I don't envy Mr. Beast or Chris at all, transitioning in the public eye seems like an awful experience. It's not like trans women don't know that large portions of the public views them as 'grotesques'. I've seen her get spit on in public and it's made me much more of a pro-trans partisan.

Fame and fortune can deform relationships in a lot of ways, and I don't know how professional vs. how genuine Chris and Mr. Beast's relationship is. It seems most likely to me that Mr. Beast is a ruthless click chaser and will gradually phase out anything that reduces engagement or merch sales, but it's possible witnessing a friend be subject to mass online harassment will polarize him on trans issues.

Alas, he can’t come out and fire the transitioned member without losing corporate sponsorship and reputation.

He would also be losing a friend. Regardless of anything else, sticking by your friends is admirable. Especially when it actually hurts.

I’ve said before- most people have identical views on trans which amount to ‘sure, we should probably humor them most of the time, but they didn’t actually change their sex and we don’t have to humor them all the time’. That goes for both the anti-trans activists and most people who push trans acceptance.

And honestly, that’s what’s showing up here. ‘Wear a dress if it floats your boat, but that doesn’t make your concept of gender a thing that exists’ is an attitude that explains a lot of this.

Are Mr. Beasts new videos with Chris diatribes about the concept of gender, or is it just the same stuff he always made but with an awkward looking two months of HRT transwoman in them now? The most recent "Beast Reacts" video has Chris and she and some other guy just react to trick shot videos, maybe they talk about gender ideology in another video but I'm not willing to watch much more of their mind numbing content.

I think 2rafa's comment about finding MTF people 'grotesque' is the real explanation. There isn't some disagreement about gender theory here, people just don't want to look at a non-passing transwoman do replacement level reactions to trick shots.

And honestly, that’s what’s showing up here. ‘Wear a dress if it floats your boat, but that doesn’t make your concept of gender a thing that exists’ is an attitude that explains a lot of this.

I honestly think it's worse than that. You can avoid being awkward around someone whose behavior you tolerate/affirm but don't think has a strong ideological grounding. The people in the comments aren't complaining about incoherent pro-trans talking points. They're complaining about having this stuff affect the show at all. And those are just the moderated comments.

This is more of a "okay, I clearly see that 'what floats your boat' is going to impose upon me and I simply don't want to deal with it (presumably this is where the lack of coherence is particularly annoying)". Unlike Caitlyn, who one can love from a distance, people can see that actually knowing someone like this personally just potentially introduces weirdness and destabilizes dynamics.

It's tolerance in an older sense of not trying to prevent things you do not like, but not in the way modern leftists use it.

Given the demographics of gen z, presumably lots of these commenters have some experience with going trans imposing on group dynamics.

Maybe. This stuff has grown fast, and the fastest growing segments aren't teenaged boys - MrBeast's audience- AFAICT.

But my other comment in this thread is wondering just how many of the audience commenting is American in the first place..

I don't think we can take for granted that they are.

EDIT: And, of course, people have less reason to be considerate on an anonymous forum complaining about what is essentially their favorite show being ruined by a new plotline.

Rush Limbaugh was bemoaning the redefinition of “tolerance” as acceptance in the 90’s. As a person with autism, my appreciation of his defense of precise language was one factor in my enjoyment of his program.

Mr. Beast was recently the subject of…I hate to say “cancel culture”, it’s rapidly become a thought-terminating cliche…but he was the subject of a recent cancel culture overreach that was possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kelseyweekman/mrbeast-helping-blind-people-youtube-stunt-philanthropy

The awful radioactive naked singularity that spawned this cancel being…

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/10/mrbeasts-blindness-video-puts-systemic-ableism-on-display/

…an article which posits that there is no such thing as disability, and all people are valid, and it’s charity porn to cure blindness, because how do we even know the “cure” will work?

A truly, shockingly stupid take, given it’s cataract surgery, which obviously works.

I think it's somewhat less an attempt to cancel him and more to bring an extremely popular 'independent' institution to heel since, well, can't have anyone out there who might go off-narrative and isn't marching in lockstep with the social justice cause of the day.

Not when his popularity could be used to spread 'the message' instead.

They tried the same with PewDiePie in his day.

Or consider Chris Pratt, and half-baked attempts to cancel him as his star is continuing to rise, despite being a practicing Christian with general conservative values.

Mr. Beast managed to walk the fine line but you can't get to that level of fame without attracting the ones who would like to access your audience for their own ends.

(removed quote)

You know that old saw about women being human beings while men are human doings? I.e. that women are valued for their innate characteristics (many of them directly or indirectly related to their fertility) while men are valued for their achievements and usefulness to others - or devalued if they are lacking in this regard.

It is not a new thought that some of the negative reactions by women against MtF could be seen as the hunter's animosity against the poacher: In this view, a transwoman is a man that wants to be valued for being a woman. And that is seen as presumptuous, as laying claim to a privilege the transwoman is not entitled to.

Since I got you in an introspective mood: do you think this is at least part of what you feel?

Maybe. I actually took that section out maybe ten minutes before you posted this, because it didn't sit right, I think 'uncomfortable' is the best word and psychologizing myself probably isn't as helpful here.

I edited the comment to reflect that. I actually believe in a "right to forget" for people who aren't public officials or journalists.

Your alternative explanations sound plausible. And they are not mutually exclusive anyway. There might be some kind of uncanny valley effect going on as well.

For a while it looked like wokeness successfully harnessed young men's temperament and turned it towards "edgy leftism". Whether that was a short lived trend, or an algorithmically created mirage is anyone's guess.

I think young men are more inclined towards edginess and tearing down social mores than building them up. So in the Bush-era when evangelical Christianity vs. atheism was the culture war then young men probably would have been on the reddit atheism side.

When I was 14, George W. Bush was president. I don't know about the average, but there was a definitely a phase around the time American Idiot came out where it seemed like all anyone in my high school was doing was dunking on W. And this was in Tennessee.

This could definitely have been my personal bubble though. In 2004, I didn't know what a "bubble" was.

How much of that was a result of the instinctive contrarianism of teenage boys, reacting to the cultural consensus among adults in that particular local context, though? Like, if you’re in Tennessee, and the prevailing hegemonic culture is conservative and Evangelical, then a contrarian reacting against it will be attracted to whatever ideology will be most likely to piss those people off. Whereas where I grew up in California, the cultural consensus among adults was liberal, meaning that a contrarian teenager would react by adopting an ideology likely to piss off liberals.

That feels accurate for sure. In those days, in the place I lived, it felt like all the non-Baptists (including me) were being dominated by the Baptists, and we probably were pushing back against that.

Plus a lot of my friends were really into Korn. I'm not sure anyone does that except to be contrary.

Korn slaps.

Yeah I was only joking really. Korn was my gateway drug into all kinds of hardcore etc.

deleted

That wasn't necessarily progressive, I think most of it was just anti-conservative, from both independents and Democrats. At that time this was an important distinction.

For W's entire term a standard Democrat would have been against gay marriage. They also would have been against crime, drugs, and war.

Again, hard to judge averages through a computer screen, but going by top recommendations on various social media, for a while it seemed like the "cool" thing was to chant "black trans lives matter" (clap emoji, clap emoji, clap emoji), talk about socialism, and joke about gulags. Maybe it was all a mirage because western SocMedia were so heavily censored/manipulated, Then again, if you follow lefty influencers, you could see the whole thing falling apart as they started burning out on wokeness, burning out on politics, and forming circular firing squads.

Yeah, for women aged 16-35 on Twitter or Tumblr, the pussy-hat-wearing brigade.

I don't have access to their analytics, but I really honestly doubt that people like Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube, Vaush, DeamonMama, Hasan Piker, and a whole bunch of B-list personalities that I never bothered checking out, but who are obviously trying to appeal to young nerdy men had a majority female audience. I'd be surprised if they had anything approaching parity. I think I heard some of the trans influencers brag about how they managed to attract a women audience talking about politics, but if there was a way of verifying, I'd bet 1000$ right now that all these women were trans themselves.

No offense to either of you, but this is Hlynka levels of forcing reality to fit your theory.

I don't have the analytics either, but I do have a zoomer son, and the possibility that he and/or his friends are spending time watch Contrapoints is... remote.

If for no other reason, then because she doesn't upload videos more than once a year anymore...

Anyway, I agree she's more Millennial material, but there was a time the whole Internet went gaga about her.

More comments

ContraPoints' audience being primarily young men is entirely compatible with this theory, though. There would still be many millions of progressive young men in the US alone.

Teenage boys IME are mostly interested in sex, tempered with some combination of drugs, violence, and/or sport -- I just don't see how Contrapoints would scratch any of these itches.

Ed: Of course now that I think about it neither does Mr. Beast AIUI -- maybe chalk him up to camaraderie or something?

More comments

Teenage boys understand what makes teachers mad.

And their teachers are going to be watching their TikTok and YouTube comments, are they?

You're implying that the reaction is "performative political incorrectness", but this is impossible, because the audience they want to make seethe isn't watching, and everyone knows it.

The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success.

I haven't watched him previously, but I've been peripherally aware of Mr Beast from friends that have kids that enjoy watching him. Flipping that unboxing video on, it is unbelievable awkward and strained, and frankly I don't see how it could be anywhere other way. Trying to put myself in the shoes of Mr Beast, I think there is approximately zero chance that I could sit next to my best from childhood with him wearing a ridiculous tube top, looking like a comically bad parody of a non-passing trans woman, knowing that he'd destroyed his marriage for that and be able to summon any more positive emotion than extreme pity. In all likelihood, my contempt for abandonment of family and personal disfigurement would swamp that pity. I don't think I could sit there and pretend that this is still my friend in any meaningful sense.

I continue to become more convinced that this should never have been openly tolerated, much less celebrated.

The response among Gen Z has been overwhelmingly negative. When I checked last night, 8 of the 10 most watched videos for the search “Mr Beast” were a negative reaction to Chris’s transition, the total view count of which was more than 80 million. The comments overwhelmingly negative. A typical comment section looked like this, sometimes with more than 25k comments.

I'm not familiar with the TikTok software/algorithm or with MrBeast - how much of this is modulated by whatever the algorithm wants to show you based on your search, versus actually reflecting the general tenor of the MrBeast fanbase? There are 2 components here, 1 being your own personal tastes as judged by the TikTok algorithm, and 2 being that TikTok wants to keep you hooked onto the app and looking at more videos, rather than returning some sort of "true" or "unbiased" reflection of what people are posting.

In my case, for my screenshots, I made a (new) account and sorted by Top for Today in the settings. This is an unbiased sorting of videos by keyword according to Likes and Dates. As for, “how did these videos become so liked in the first place”, the algorithm is quite good at showing people what they want to watch; the likes and agreeing comments would invalidate the possibility that these are just being watched for “outrage porn” reasons.

Thanks for the explanation. It seems that you did as best as you could to try to get an unbiased look at it, and I agree that whatever results you got is likely not due to some sort of bias in the algorithm pushing to show you such things, but rather due to reflecting some underlying reality in the group of people who watch and pay attention to MrBeast. I don't have much to say on the object level issue, but it does fit in with an overall trend I think is present in trans issues specifically and idpol CW issues generally, which is that a small minority of people with their levers in power tend to be very good at manipulating those levers to falsely give the impression of their views being more popular than they are. That said, I'm skeptical that TikTok is much of a "Wild West" sort of platform where we can get a "true" reflection of what people truly think, but perhaps it's better in this particular context.

It's still biased, just not by the 'algorithm'. We're a trans-skeptical community. And we, as OP and other comments demonstrate, are interested in examples of 'the world at large' being trans-skeptical. You're more likely to see a post here about a big outpour of trans-skepticism than of trans-acceptance. So we got a post about MrBeastChris, but not the daughter of a saudi oligarch who got kidnapped from the US because they were trans, and so on. So that's the simplest level of selection - if BeastChris came out as trans and everyone clapped and nothing else happened, it wouldn't have been a toplevel post.

That's part of it, but it's not enough - MrBeast is the biggest american youtuber. That's a very natural and very small 'class', and selection effects are less strong when the class you're selecting from is smaller. But - clearly, this issue resonated with us. Maybe trans-chris resonates a lot more with anti-trans people than pro-trans people, for whatever reason, so they're more likely to comment about it, make videos about it, etc. If 1% of viewers comment, that's not always the same 1% - so if something specific makes a usually-silent 1% more likely to comment, they suddenly seem to represent the whole viewership, even when they don't. So there's clearly some pushback, but the scale is difficult to estimate, because whether 80% of beast fans or 10% of beast fans had a bone to pick, they'd still take over the comments. And any time the same things drive you and others of the same viewpoint to look at something, the people interested in that will be disproportionately 'like you'.

The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement

Or Mr Beast has a global audience and the median global viewer is far less sympathetic.

EDIT: Let's see how things like merch sales (disproportionately more American) are affected.

That’s a possibility, though the comments are in English and India (his second largest country by views) has banned Tik Tok. After India his biggest fan base is in UK and Canada, so the top three for fan base on Tik Tok is anglosphere. Maybe it’s trivial for Indians to bypass the ban though, I have no idea.

They were, like many authentic friend groups in America, all male.

The implication being that women are less likely to be in authentic friend groups? I don't think you mean to say that, and I won't treat you as if you have. Or do you actually stand by that implication?

This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.

Who is doing the manipulating? I suspect it's Mr. Beast and his staff, which is less objectionable than the platforms doing it themselves.

Body language, rapport, banter, and general “vibes” have ruined what led children to watch his content.

Can you give an example via timestamp?

I do wonder, however, if Jimmy will consider just riding it out. I'm not sure how many principled people there are amongst his audience and their parents, and he may very well get to have his cake and eat it too.

The implication being that women are less likely to be in authentic friend groups?

Anecdotal thought. I've noticed that parasocial relationship shows for young losers — usually podcasts — emerge and grow wildly popular with all-male casts. At some point, the viewership numbers make them something of an institution, rather than a garage-band operation. They feel compelled to include a female co-host. The show then reaches cultural eclipse.

Prototypical example: Giant Bomb

There's some level of tension and inhibition that comes with mixed-sex groups. It's not universal and it's hard to prove, because no will admit "I'm afraid of saying something creepy in the presence of a female", but I'm convinced the dynamic is real.

At some point, the viewership numbers make them something of an institution, rather than a garage-band operation. They feel compelled to include a female co-host. The show then reaches cultural eclipse.

Probably to expand the audience reach. Seems like a common-sense tactic - bring on people for different demographics to identify with easier.

Probably to expand the audience reach. Seems like a common-sense tactic - bring on people for different demographics to identify with easier

Maybe that's the idea. But when every organism that emerges to dominate a certain niche looks like a crab, it's probably unwise to genetically engineer yourself away from those traits, even if it makes sense on paper.

I don't think demographics are the concern, personalities are. I think most people can look past a person's outside to see if they fit in.

Who exactly was complaining (are they always the same people? Just a few people focusing on the same thing?

But does it work? I find it just as plausible that messing with the dynamic by adding a 'novel' member could also lose you some of the existing audience. And if that thought occurs to me, I'm sure it occurs to anybody whose livelihood depends on those analytics. And if a popular podcast or show were to still increase on popularity after the new member's addition, is that vindication or irrelevance?

Popularity is a fickle thing, and I have no idea how you would be able to tease an assessment from all the available data, given the number of factors blowing around in the wind. But I have always found the 'common sense' argument of "Duh, add a woman to grow the audience!" lacking in demonstration. It's so 'obvious' that you wonder why so many companies didn't snatch the free money earlier.

"Common sense" is perhaps the wrong choice, I think "intuitive" would be better. That is to say, we imagine that people might encounter some resistance to engaging with something if they don't feel an obvious relationship to it, but that's not always the case. Media like F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Dragon Ball, How I Met Your Mother, Naruto, etc. have tremendous cross-racial popularity, and there's media with relatable demographics that fail despite that.

So it doesn't surprise me that media tries to widen demographic appeal on the basis that it might attract new followers, but I agree that it's not necessarily the cause of a show's success.

"Common sense" is perhaps the wrong choice, I think "intuitive" would be better. That is to say, we imagine that people might encounter some resistance to engaging with something if they don't feel an obvious relationship to it, but that's not always the case. Media like F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Dragon Ball, How I Met Your Mother, Naruto, etc. have tremendous cross-racial popularity, and there's media with relatable demographics that fail despite that.

I wouldn't characterize this as "intuitive" either, and I wouldn't characterize media like FRIENDS with its all-white cast or Dragon Ball with its primarily Japanese/alien/male characters as having characters where the audience has no "obvious relationship" to them. This only makes sense under the framing that having certain demographic characteristics in common with characters constitutes an "obvious relationship," I don't think it's either common sense or intuitive. Certainly many people assert it or something like it, but that's not the same thing as it being intuitive. I also think that "despite" in that last sentence doesn't belong there, as it implies that having relatable demographics would have some sort of positive effect on popularity, which is certainly not intuitive at the very least.

Fucking hell. You reminded me about Giant Bomb. I drifted away from them around 2019-2020, checked back just now, and recognized absolutely no one on the podcast but Jan. Half of that fucking was the staff's vast knowledge/experience in the industry, and they're just... gone?

Man, given that there wasn't a Jan when I last listened, I guess I shouldn't bother checking then. I guess nothing lasts forever, but the old Giant Bomb crew was special and you can't just replace them. In hindsight it seems kind of like Ryan's death was the writing on the wall for that site.

In hindsight it seems kind of like Ryan's death was the writing on the wall for that site.

Friendly PSA for overweight mottizens. See a doctor if you're over 35 BMI. Normal for Americans does not mean normal.

It happened within a week of his wedding...

Possible counter example could be Chapo Trap House. They have men and one woman. On an unrelated note I listened to part of two episodes and found it completely unlistenable. Terrible audio content. But it is inexplicably popular as far as podcasts for socialist zoomers go.

Possible counter example could be Chapo Trap House. They have men and one woman. On an unrelated note I listened to part of two episodes and found it completely unlistenable. Terrible audio content. But it is inexplicably popular as far as podcasts for socialist zoomers go.

The one thing I know about Chapo is that they were the only left-leaning community extreme enough to be banned from Reddit during the 2020 banwave. Quite a feat.

That might be Cumtown leaking. Reddit banned them also.

Chapo were quarantined way before cumtown.

Most of the people clipping it are posting it on Tik Tok, but some examples I can find on YouTube: 1, 2. If you watch the video you notice a weird distance between the members and a stressful look on MB’s face, which viewers picked up on and discuss on Tik Tok.

No, but that many teenage boys are in all-male friend groups. Adding in a girl or an MTF to an all-male friend group changes the dynamic.

MB is YouTube’s prized real estate, I would not be surprised if YouTube corporate is deleting comments, and they also delete and reduce the popularity of YouTubers who are critical of LGBT issues.

No, but that many teenage boys are in all-male friend groups. Adding in a girl or an MTF to an all-male friend group changes the dynamic.

I figured as much, just wanted that to be clear. Thanks for your edit as well.

The implication being that women are less likely to be in authentic friend groups.

You're telling on yourself. The implication is that authentic friend groups are more likely to be same sex.

Who is doing the manipulating?

YouTube is doing heavy manipulation of comments, search results, recommended feeds, trending feeds, and even user subscriptions.

You're telling on yourself. The implication is that authentic friend groups are more likely to be same sex.

Nope. I treat people here as being careful with their words. So if you say "male" instead of "same sex", then I assume you mean that. If the OP means what you do (and I suspect they do), then I'm pointing out where they should either clarify or stand by their words.

YouTube is doing heavy manipulation of comments, search results, recommended feeds, trending feeds, and even user subscriptions.

I'm fairly certain that Youtube comment sections also allow the video poster to engage in banning certain words or whatever. So it's not clear to me that this is the platform at work (and Mr. Beast is not naive about this, he undoubtedly engages with the feature).

If the OP means what you do (and I suspect they do), then I'm pointing out where they should either clarify or stand by their words.

Asking for a clarification is fine. Implying implications is a bit accusatory.

I'm fairly certain that Youtube comment sections also allow the video poster to engage in banning certain words or whatever. So it's not clear to me that this is the platform at work (and Mr. Beast is not naive about this, he undoubtedly engages with the feature.

When it comes to comments there's probably more of the posters involvement, but you hear creators complaining about legitimate comments landing in the spam bin.

But stuff like reaction videos appearing in the TikTok recommended feed, but not in YouTube, us almost certainly YouTube's "deradicalization" algorithm at work.

Asking for a clarification is fine. Implying implications is a bit accusatory.

I was making clear what I thought the implication was and explicitly said I didn't think that it was what they meant.