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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.
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:
...
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 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.
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.
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Oh, I copied it from an older comment where I said the same thing.
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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.
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.
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..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:
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.
Perhaps the Chinese learned from the French, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
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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.
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.
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He would also be losing a friend. Regardless of anything else, sticking by your friends is admirable. Especially when it actually hurts.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Korn slaps.
Yeah I was only joking really. Korn was my gateway drug into all kinds of hardcore etc.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Unless you’re talking about two completely different demographics. Gen-Z doesn’t watch Mr Beast.
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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.
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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.
Yeah, I guess that's kinda it for Sterling's career unless she does some radical changes.
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It's Stephanie Sterling now.
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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.
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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.
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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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Uh, wasn't PewDiePie the PewDiePie of Gen Z? I'm a fairly young millennial and he was definitely after my time.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Can someone link the actual tiktok videos? Searching without an account doesn't give you videos but channels.
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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.
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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?
Who is doing the manipulating? I suspect it's Mr. Beast and his staff, which is less objectionable than the platforms doing it themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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...
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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?
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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.
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.
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You're telling on yourself. The implication is that authentic friend groups are more likely to be same sex.
YouTube is doing heavy manipulation of comments, search results, recommended feeds, trending feeds, and even user subscriptions.
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.
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).
Asking for a clarification is fine. Implying implications is a bit accusatory.
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.
I was making clear what I thought the implication was and explicitly said I didn't think that it was what they meant.
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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.
I figured as much, just wanted that to be clear. Thanks for your edit as well.
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Twitter: BBC objects to 'government funded media' label
I'm sorry, I don't really see the point of the complaints. Or rather: I see a point, but it's not interesting or flattering.
The BBC license it's mandated by the government.
The fact that artists and defenders of the BBC itself argue attempts to remove the 'fee' will harm programming or is a deliberate attempt to cow the BBC also militates towards the conclusion that the worries implied by "state-affiliated" or "state-funded" apply - though I grant that it is a more refined arrangement than direct payment.
So...the government not imposing a "fee" is an attack on an institution's functioning but we're supposed to act like it isn't a tax or the BBC isn't government funded?
So what reason does anyone (not benefiting from media branding) have to take any of this seriously? It seems to me that the real basis for complaint here is that BBC doesn't want to even theoretically be in the same bucket as Al Jazeera and RT. But it is precisely the media's fault that terms like "state media" are so badly received. Just as it is the media that marks certain dictators as "reformers" and others "strongmen" with "regimes" to aid its attempts to manufacture consent. They constructed this complex of Words That Hint At Things But Can't Be Called Out Cause They're Technically Correct.
So, because the media doesn't want to be marked by its own taboo-words and bad branding everyone is supposed to pretend that an entity funded by a government mandated license, whose supporters claim would fail without aforementioned government mandate everyone is supposed to ignore the correct labeling?
Is it the media's fault that terms like "state media" are badly received? Or is it the fact that a lot of state run media historically and observably tends to be biased towards the state and people can recognize that? The media doesn't have to tell me that a Ukraine government run news media organization and a Russian government run news media organization are likely to both need to be taken with a huge pinch of salt when reporting on the Ukraine war/special operation. Or that the news organization run by the Saudi or Iranian governments is unlikely to be taking stances the government does not like.
The media does not create authoritarian states. It certainly will (at least in the West) tend to downplay the authoritarian nature of states that are our allies and upsell the opposite. But that doesn't mean differences don't actually exist. The fact that a state run media arm should be regarded with suspicion (on reporting to do with anything to do with the government at least) is because historically that has been a problem. Our media didn't create that idea even if they over/undersell it depending on circumstance.
Having said that the Beeb is an interesting construct. Its funding mostly comes from the public by way of a government law for the License fee. However its existence is part of a Royal Charter which mandates its independence from the government itself. So is it accurate to say it is government funded? Kind of yes, kind of no. It doesn't get its money from the government but whether people have to pay it and how much IS determined by the government. In theory its supposed to be an independent reporter on the government and not biased towards either the government of the opposition.
In practice (and in my direct experience in interacting with the Beeb) it is kind of pro-establishment generally (which makes sense), with a slight social leftward lean and a slight conservative economic lean. Though it is I think slightly more positive towards whichever party happens to be in power at any given moment overall (which again makes sense from an incentive point of view). This is from dealing with the Beeb when working for both the Conservative and Labour parties.
If the point of the tag is to point out the level of possible bias then I don't think the BBC should get the same tag as a directly operated state organization. Though it's probably fine to get some sort of tag. I'll note Musk himself says he thinks the BBC is one of the least biased outlets for whatever that is worth. The BBC is big enough and important enough in the English speaking world that you could probably give it its own unique tag.
If the point of the tag is to "own the media" then sure keep it, it's just partisan sniping with little meaning in any case.
That's a synonym for "tax". The BBC isn't just government-funded, but has a special tax created just to keep it in existence.
And the independence of the BBC has been a great comedic punchline for decades now:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=B9tzoGFszog
Sure but its set up not to go to the government for disbursement so as to try to avoid the control issue.
Even when i worked for the governing party I could not just go to the BBC to squash stories.
Its fair to say there is some influence but in my sirect experience it isn't directly government controlled.
Would have made my life easier if it were.
Unless you were the Minister of Culture I don't know why you'd think you could. Of course the tea boy in 10 Downing Street doesn't get to boss people around as much as a cabinet minister would. YOUR failure to influence the Beeb doesn't mean everyone in the British government is similarly toothless.
No, but I would have known who could influence them, or my boss would.
There were ways to influence stories but the same way of influencing other outlets, build personal connections, offer a juicier story or exclusive etc.
But within government there is no standard path to control the Beeb's output.
Which isn't to say it doesn't have bias as mentioned above.
How certain are you that the status quo does not involve something analagous to The Twitter Files, with multiple govt agencies providing advisory concerns for subjects like pandemics, terrorism, mis/dis/malinformation, etc?
I think you have to agree these relationships must exist, indeed to control the Beeb’s output. But this happens for private media, too! I can’t prove, but strongly suspect, these relationships are stronger with the Beeb than Telegraph or Guardian.
I suspect the cynical explanation is that the British government doesn't have the same motive for putting its thumb on the scale like the American government would. They don't need to sell their people on any narrative in particular, because they don't really get themselves into wars (and pretty much most of the ones the UK has been in after WWII have been divisive at best) and they aren't tied up in global affairs like the US is.
So, I would say, yes, the BBC will probably be tilted in favor of the establishment, but there's no real pressure to be against said establishment.
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There should be a term for the opposite of 'Gellman Amnesia' : "You don't realize how blind you're to brainwashing in a hivemind, until you're outside the hivemind."
The BBC seems 'independent' because it is occasionally critical of the British govt and will often give a platform to those who wish death to the western civilizational consensus. But, there is a '50 Stalins' aspect to that criticism and there are certain 'sacred cows' which can never so much as be mentioned, let alone criticized or analyzed. Al Jazeera appears similarly liberal, critical and rational as long as they are talking about things that do not relate to Qatar.
The BBC appears independent, because we who live within the hivemind of the west do not notice the absence of a type of criticism that we do not know exists.
Care to give an actual example?
Rotherham is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that covered for the government, but Jimmy Saville and Martin Bashir's Lady Di interview were verboten topics for a long time at the BBC.
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Just because you call it
ship moneya licence fee, doesn't mean it isn't a tax. The government impose it.More importantly the BBC is perfectly willing to attack the government. But by "government" here, I mean the democratically elected institutions of the state. The BBC does however loyally represent (and is part of) the permanent state institutional structure.
Yes, and every kind of yes.
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This is... not how I would describe them. When did the Beeb last express a preference for lower taxes?
I'd say the BBC is pro-establishment as opposed to pro-government; much like the New York Times, it sees itself as the voice of civil society. Witness for example the recent furore over Gary Lineker's tweets: despite comparing the current government to Nazis, BBC management weren't able to keep Lineker off-air, or even get a promise to stop tweeting about it.
So calling them state-funded media does seem a little unfair; they're obviously not beholden to the executive. Deep-state-funded media, perhaps? If only there was a Twitter flag for that.
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“State media” is often used by the media as a shorthand for “media that’s controlled by a hostile state”, much like “regime” is used to indicate that a given nation is not aligned with western interests. It is a boo-term quite often as it counts as state control the things that hostile governments do, but not things we do. NPR is funded directly by the government through a grant system. If a program wants the grants and access to the NPR radio stations, it must produce shows that our government likes. If they reported on the news from too “radical” (read: anti-establishment) perspective, it won’t get funding or airtime. It’s basically patronage — I pay you on the basis of liking what you’ve done so far and I expect you to keep making things I like; and keep in mind that your patronage is up for renewal every year.
In essence, the very definition of “state media” is as a propaganda term meant to engender suspicion of that media’s reportage. And as such, it’s useless in most contexts to say “state run media should be viewed with suspicion” often reduces to “media that narrative makers declare are to be viewed with suspicion are to be viewed with suspicion.” Not to say that in some places reporting the wrong news story can mean free striped pajamas for the entire staff, but that the term itself isn’t used neutrally, and that it’s often inserted in reporting on other countries as a way to cast doubt on the data from hostile government funded media. Other supposedly free media outlets are not necessarily more evenhanded or reliable. If the Congo Times gets no funding from the government, but is run by a political party, is that better than the “state run” Congo Tribune that is run by the government?
The proper conclusion from this is to be suspicious of NPR too. You're writing as if criticizing NPR for bias is outside the Overton window. Maybe it is for the left, but it certainly isn't among conservatives. (Maybe replacing "that our government likes" with "that the deep state likes".)
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Right, but that doesn't mean they are actually wrong. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'd trust the BBC more in general than a Chinese state run media service in general because I know roughly how much power the British government has over the BBC and I know roughly what level of influence can be exerted when and under what circumstances.
Don't trust any media is not the same thing as all media being equally untrustworthy.
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That's part of why it works; it's not untrue. No one can is going to die on the hill that Saddam doesn't have a "'regime". The words aren't necessarily wrong when it's used, the question is what's the impression given and why it's not used sometimes.
Even people defending the BBC often undermine the argument for its independence. Hell, the argument linked above is directly calling funding decisions (which the government has always been able to take) as direct partisan attacks.
IIRC the original tag that NPR complained about was something like "state affiliated media". If it was "state media" then I kind of get the charge.
"Government funded" though...I'm even less sympathetic. You can't complain that the government removing a funding mandate will crush either your programming or your reporting and also want to duck the tag.
If we agree with your take and we hate these terms for observable, rational reasons anyone can come to independently, not it being reinforced by media reminders every time a story from a hostile site comes up, then people can/will reach the same independent conclusion that Elon Musk did: that in a world of governments putting its fingers in the media pie the BBC surely counts as government funded but it represents a far more refined and civilized compromise than RT.
If not, as you say, there's literally no better placed, better branded organization to enforce a sense of nuance on any such tag just by existing.
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Yes? I mean, these are the same thing. State run media is media, their faults are media's faults. I think @bnfrmt hits closer to the mark with deep state run media, but the primary purpose of the label is to remind people to take what you learn from them with a grain of salt because they are beholden to interests other than the truth, and that they are propped up by the state - so I don't think it's inappropriate. Least biased is not not biased, and not biased is the only version we should tolerate. Anyone who claims otherwise is either brainwashed or bought.
It's not about 'owning the media' either, it is about reminding people that they are being lied to every single day by a bunch of clout chasing moral busybodies who would gladly sacrifice every prole on the planet for better standing in their incestuous community of mediocrities. That's all the BBC is these days, because that's what all journalism is these days.
But there was a time when it was just most journalism that was like that, and the only way we can get back there is by not letting the big hitters get away with anything. That includes stupid 'oh we jumbled things up, so this is no tax, even though we send enforcers around to harass you if we think you have watched television in the last week, and even though we gladly push a political agenda which protects certain interests of the state' excuses. Nope sorry, you are happy to accept the benefits of state backing, so you don't get to avoid the consequences.
To sum up, do not trust any media organisation bigger than your local newspaper. Ever.
Why would you trust your local newspaper?
I’m being a little facetious—you potentially have access to its journalists in a way you wouldn’t for national concerns. But what does that really buy you? How much time and effort do you spend on keeping the locals in check? You’re not going to rally your town to ostracize the editor, not without a truly spectacular bias.
There are fewer people pulling on the local news, which is not the same as less total pull. It’s a lot cheaper to buy glowing reviews or softball coverage from a local outlet than from the New York Times. The result is that local journalists and editors may not be biased by Big Pharma or a wannabe President, but by a local employer, a motivated city councilman, or that bitch Annette, I can’t believe she took the kids, you can’t trust her.
Scrutiny by opposing interests is higher for large outlets, too. I remember thinking it was odd for commenters to grill Miami’s local news the other week. How many people do they really reach? Anything smaller will be even less visible.
I think it’s awfully hard to start from an adversarial basis, from game theory or realpolitik, and come up with reasons to trust. The difference in local and national news is that you might give locals the benefit of the doubt.
Agreed entirely. The only reason I excluded local newspapers from my sweeping declaration is because in most places I have lived you can actually hold them accountable for dishonesty, although it's often a bit like pulling teeth. But they are usually small enough to respect reader complaints, and a lot of them are where the autistically truth-seeking oldheads ended up after society decided we were too smart to bother with the truth, because local beats are like punishment to clout chasers.
I think the two tools in a low trust environment we can use to build trust are objectivity and accountability. We can't perfect either and to err is human, but anyone who puts a sincere effort into trying to be objective and holding themselves accountable for their mistakes deserves tentative trust I reckon.
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That is a different point than I think he was making though. His point was that "our" media labels state run media of other powers as bad. Not all media is equally "bad" even if that is only because some places use a lighter touch. And that is the case whether "our" media is using it as propaganda or not.
Don't trust any media, local newspaper or not is my view. But that doesn't mean I should trust an openly state run Chinese media over the BBC.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence in other words.
To point out when I worked in politics it was much easier to have a story pulled or altered with smaller local outlets in exchange for exclusives or better stories. So local being more trustworthy is not something I would rely on.
Oh, I had the impression his point was that it's the media who came up with the label, so they don't get to throw a fit when it is appropriately applied to them. If they don't like being called state run media they can stop doing the things that make them state run media. Or alternatively, they are in the exact right position to rehabilitate the image of state run media. They refuse to do either, so the shoe fits.
Otherwise yeah, nobody gets blind trust. But I know there are some local paper editors out there who are dedicated to the truth, some out of penance for sins in the big leagues, some vindictively, some just to try to hold onto the light any way they can. Similar to how you say we can trust the BBC over CCP funded media, I think you can trust local papers more than the big hitters.
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I thought the NPR label was a bit tenuous (assuming the 10% government funding stat I’ve seen is accurate), but the BBC is absolutely state-run media.
The whole “editorial independence” thing is a joke. Here’s a test: could the BBC run a piece calling the Queen a cunt without government consequences? If they couldn’t, then they aren’t editorially independent.
NPR receives half a billion per year from the federal government.
If that sum is irrelevant, they should stop taking it and become genuinely independent from government funding to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest over an irrelevant sum of money. If it is relevant, then they are a government-funded media outlet.
NPR's entire total revenue is under $300 million: https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-public-radio-npr/
Did you really assume that every dollar the CPB spends goes to NPR?
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That's not a good test. A good test would be - if BBC did something the government really hated, could the government pull their financing? It doesn't have to be something obscene or revolting, just something that is very inconvenient for the government. If they could, then they exist at the sufferance of the government, and their "independence" is just a leash that is long enough for them not to feel it, but it's still there. If they could not, or it would be very hard (e.g. on the level of passing Constitutional amendment in the US) - then there's a real independence, even if technically financed by the governmental decree.
In theory, any government could retaliate against a sufficiently annoying journalist - even in countries with well established norms around the freedom of the press, there are many informal ways that a journalist might feel the displeasure of the government. But of course, there's a big difference between being arrested or censored for telling the wrong story, and simply facing a social or career penalty or losing access.
Personally, it's my observation that it's quite the opposite. In many circles one now faces a penalty for siding with the government, and journalists are taught to see themselves as agents of disruption, as adversaries to established power.
Well, yes, the question is how easy it is to do that and what would be the consequences. When we see something like this:
can we still claim they are "independent"? If the government can tell (successfully) the journalists what words to use, is it not government-controlled speech?
What circles are those? What I am seeing more and more nowdays is that the journalists are taught to be always the agents of The Swamp, and if The Swamp is by some freak accident of nature is temporarily not controlling the government, then disruption it is, until things return to the normal. Once they do, the journalists go back to serving as a branch of the government.
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A month ago the BBC suspended their most famous personality for tweeting something critical of the government's asylum policies.
...and then unsuspended him, with an understanding that he was allowed to do it again if he wanted to. Also, the criticism involved calling the government Nazis, which some might see as unprofessional, especially for a sports commentator.
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That is because one of the "deals" for the BBC not to be seen as partisan is that its big personalities and newscasters should try to not be partisan on areas which are Labour vs Conservative. Whether they would have suspended him for being equally of critical of the oppositions positions is the question.
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That's a bad test of independence. If most major news organizations ran such a piece the people responsible would be removed or disciplined just for being unprofessional.
Elon Musk can say whatever he wants on Twitter. There is nobody at the BBC who can say whatever they want, except the government.
Can he?
"Settlement Requires Musk to Step Down as Tesla’s Chairman; Tesla to Appoint Additional Independent Directors; Tesla and Musk Agree to Pay $40 Million in Penalties"
“At the same time, however, even Musk concedes that his free speech rights do not permit him to engage in speech that is or could ‘be considered fraudulent or otherwise violative of the securities laws.'”
He won the private securities fraud action but he still had to agree to a bunch of SEC requirements in his settlement right?
Literally, intentionally false statements can have consequences. Opinions should never be banned in a free society.
He doesn’t seem too scared of financial regulators at the moment. “Dogecoin jumps more than 30% after Musk changes Twitter logo to image of shiba inu”
So he can't say whatever he wants without suffering consequences?
I would not contest that Musk has a wider swathe of things he can say without consequence, than a BBC editor but it isn't "whatever he wants".
Let me rephrase. He can say whatever he thinks. If he has an opinion, he can tweet it. If he has an idea, he can tweet it.
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No employee at any news organization can say 'whatever they want', they're subject to standards of relevance and professionalism. It isn't a good illustration of how the British Government influences the BBC to say that writers/pundits can't call the queen a cunt, because neither could writers at almost all small time American newspapers. Not because the British Government secretly controls them, but because they have voluntarily adopted professional standards that preclude it.
It’s not that each individual employee couldn’t do it. It’s that nobody at all could do it, not even in principle. Jeff Bezos could call Obama the N-word on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow. Who could do that at the BBC? What group of people could do that? I suspect the only group that could is parliament.
If your point is that all media, even privately funded outlets, are like this in the UK, then I concede. In fact all UK outlets should have “government censored media” labels which link to an outline of the relevant laws and regulations.
I'm not trying to make a statement about the current state of British media, just calling out a poor argument. That the BBC doesn't do something (call the queen a cunt) that almost every media organization, even those not in the UK, voluntarily refrains from doing, does not provide much evidence of the level of editorial control that parliament exercises.
Any publicly traded media company would also have no individual who could call the queen a cunt without being punished by the board. If the entire board decided to call the queen a cunt on the front page they could probably be sued by share holders for damaging the company. Theoretically you could coordinate all the shareholders to approve, but that's implausible and I'm not sure why that should be a meaningful distinction between company's.
The point is 'ability to say whatever you want' doesn't practically exist at most major news companies and if you want to say the BBC as 'state owned media' is categorically different from a publicly traded American news company in a significant way you need a better example.
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I wouldn't write that either, but that's not because the government pays me to do so.
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They would get OFCOM consequences as would any media organization trying to do that in the UK. They could run a story that the Queen was corrupt (though they would need to have sourced that impeccably). They probably can run a story saying the prime minister is incompetent for example.
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The point is that because of ofcom no one in UK can run a piece calling the Queen a cunt so BBC is not in anyway more or less restricted than the other media. They are not court appointed jester. And the charming lady didn't deserve it, unlike some of her sons and one of her grandsons.
This just means that there is no media outlet with “editorial independence” in the UK. Government funding + no editorial independence = state-run media.
Of course not, just like Paramount Leader doesn’t deserve to be compared to Winnie The Pooh after doubling China’s GDP. Certainly we can agree that such common-sense regulations are necessary for the proper functioning of society.
Defining state-run media this way implies that the government funding is connected to the lack of editorial independence, which is false here.
The government funding implies a “don’t piss off the government too much” rule, at least more so than privately funded media orgs.
But the rule applies equally to the BBC and to privately funded media orgs. There is no "more so than" here.
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Queen Elizabeth was an direct inheritor of stolen wealth who personally claimed fame, importance, and power for the sole reason that her ancestors were some of the worst war criminals who ever lived. For the reason she didn't renounce it all as soon as she could, she definitely deserves every insult.
This makes matters even worse. I think we have an obligation to insult world leaders this morally compromised who protect themselves from criticism through censorious laws and policies. In that spirit, Queen Elizabeth is a dead, inbred, nepo-baby under the delusion that her family's legacy of warcrimes was something to be proud of and (example below) Xi Jinping is an incompetent Winnie-the-Pooh look-alike running the world's second-largest economy into the ground. Don't be afraid to say so!
There's no need to insult Shaka Zulu, Julius Caesar, Temujin (aka Chinngis Khan), Attila, or Timur like that.
Yes, I know, and maybe about 50 others? Once you reach a certain level I'm not sure distinguishing who was absolutely worst is relevant and probably pretty impossible---how do you weight how many were affected, how brutal they were to each individual, how they were relative to others at the time, what they personally did vs. what others did on their orders, etc. This is why I said "some of the".
The British Empire was pretty exceptional in its scale and recency however.
Given that all empires everywhere and forever have done evil, I'd sooner distinguish them by what good they've done. From my American perspective, the British Empire might be the all-time winner for its role in creating the amazingly prosperous anglophone nations and for their role in preserving historical treasures. When the Ottomans were busy destroying the Parthenon with carelessly stored gunpowder, the British were spending their treasure to preserve what was left of it. Sure, I can find plenty of bad things that the British Empire did, but the world is better for its existence.
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The British, however, did not reach that level.
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I don't think the entirety of the British Empire can be laid at the feet of titular monarchs. Certainly George VI had no control over Churchill's actions with regard to the Bengal famine. And the conquest of India wasn't done by royal command, but instead by a corporation originally chartered just to trade. The British monarchs certainly didn't exercise the personal control that the people I named did.
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Worst war criminals with better technology, manpower, institutions and education. Also it was conquered fair and square, not stolen. Vae Victis.
If the word "fair" appies to conquering in your books then you might as well own stealing as well. After all, conquering is merely stealing while having enough manpower to do so openly.
Not quite. A state is monopoly of violence over certain territory. That's it. If a state conquers another state - than the first state had no business existing in the first place, so all property rights guaranteed by the conquered state are void
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That's an unusual view. Might makes right is really not generally accepted as a good basis for morality. I guess it's best to link that instead of me badly summarizing a bunch of well-known arguments.
Edit: I think I understand better---you're saying that morality for countries/civilizations interacting is very different than that for people. I agree that this is probably true, but it would still be nice to justify why this particular difference exists. I think all the logic for might makes right being wrong for people transfers over? Most simply, it's better if societies could focus their energies on productive endeavors instead of zero-sum building of war-making potential so they can conquer and avoid being conquered.
Might does not make right between people only because there are legal systems in place that codify rights on bases other than might. Such systems do not exist between states, or are ineffective.
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Sure it is; that's why human beings seek might in the first place.
Standard operating procedure for the mighty is to claim that business and honor march hand in hand; specifically, a realist practice that ceases to be profitable for the mightiest is a useful cassus belli (militarily or financially) against the dishonorable opponent who might still otherwise be in a position to extract some benefit from it.
For example, a country whose economy means men and women aren't equally productive only granting rights to the more capable gender in aggregate will find itself labelled as "immoral" by a mightier country seeking to hinder their development until they obey.
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It is permissible to argue this here.
What is not permissible here is actually delivering the invective. It's the epitome of pure heat, no light. You can argue that it should be permitted; it is not permitted here.
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I think the BBC is being a bit silly. However, why does Twitter only single out the governments? Why not say "Murdoch-funded" or "Bezos-funded" or "Roberts-funded"?
Well Twitter is itself Elon-funded. Somebody has to fund everything.
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Because Bezos isn’t trying to manufacture consent for any wars he is waging.
Unless it's the war against the unionization of Amazon?
Is Bezos killing the families of people trying to unionize? Blowing up their homes? Maybe razing the towns they live in?
No.
This is the First World, one needs only to socially murder one's opponents as opposed to taking the drastic option of offering helicopter rides.
This is to say that I don't think there's really that much difference other than the continued existence of the biological entities in question. I imagine even the Soviet Union had more sophisticated ways of applying bootheels to human faces than Stalin's mass murdering.
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No one asked but one point on this: The CBC in Canada is state-owned and state-funded, I couldn't really object to such a label being put on it. It's technically correct, and twitter can't really differentiate on vibes. But if anyone holds the belief that it's somehow on par with Russia Today, that's ridiculous: it has the same left-wing bias as as every non-right-wing network does, and for the same reasons: it's run by people with that bias. It continues to have that bias no matter who's in political power.
And as queasy as state-funded media might make me on principle, it's got plenty of competition from private entities, and the bias of wanting to spread sensationalism for views is also a problem (including with the CBC, who sells ads and likes views just like everyone), so having some variety in the ecosystem seems good.
Is it?
I've seen a lot of really interesting and insightful programming on Russia today, more so than I have on the CBC (and I don't live in Canada, America or Russia). I don't really see why RT is getting called out for being uniquely bad when they've consistently been more correct on factual issues than the regular press. Hallucinations about Iraqi WMDs and Trump/Russia collusion are just two of the most prominent examples that come to mind (I'm sure people here don't need a long recitation of media perfidy), and I don't see any reason for the BBC to be privileged over RT on that rubric.
If you're saying you find their worldview more appealing, go for it. I'm talking about degree of state-control and overall mission. (If you think RT is better in that regard, then I am brainwashed by the Cathedral and you can ignore whatever I say.) Russia Today is a straightforward tool of the state, when Putin invades Ukraine he knows RT will say what he needs them to, journalists who defy this at risk of falling out windows. CBC does not operate anything like this, they're just part of same Blue-tribe that all think alike. Same with CNN in the Iraq War days, they supported the war for the same reason most Americans did, they were mad about 9/11 and in a patriotic mood, the journalists both felt this themselves and knew it's what their audience wanted.
CBC's mission is probably horribly corrupted by an activist worldview, but they still adhere to whatever mix of journalistic integrity/modern activism their average reporter can defend to themselves. Their gov't stipend has little to do with that and mischaracterizes the entire problem. RT is much simpler and easy to characterize.
I'm not saying I find their worldview more appealing - I know that they have a perspective/angle/bias, I just don't think this means I should pretend that CBC or western media in general does not. Sure, journalists who defy Putin can end up falling out of windows, but I fail to see how this is so much worse than journalists having their cars go out of control and spontaneously explode when they start investigating government wrongdoing or put out stories which badly embarrass military generals.
As for all the mea culpas about their handling of the Iraq war - sure, I believe that. But at the same time absolutely nothing has changed! There has been no reflection, no self-examination, no correction. There have been no retractions or corrections or award rescindments for the unadulterated fiction that was presented as coverage of the Trump/Russia scandal, and the same people are still using the same techniques to manufacture consent on other issues today. Ultimately, I just don't think "whatever mix of journalistic integrity/modern activism their average reporter can defend to themselves. " is worth anything at all, and it in no way justifies the removal of a factually accurate label like "government-funded" or "state media".
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