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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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