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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36381 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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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'.

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