MrBeast Failed to Disclose Ads and Improperly Collected Children's Data
bbbprograms.org
bbbprograms.org
He learned from the master lol. Missing a wide-eyed surprised face thumbnail though.
I mean not a lot of people are out there making "I Worked for ________, They Were Awesome & I Was the One Who Sucked" videos, right?
Do you know they're valid or do you like to believe they're valid?
I also think the linked video got pretty ridiculous pointing to CGI explosions or edited in buildings evidence of "faked videos" when I think, again, not crime, and not even importantly misleading in the sense people usually are talking about when talking about faked videos: e.g. bigfoot being a guy in a costume. The kind of thing I would consider violating the contract with the viewer would be something more like integrity of outcomes in competitions.
Which is to say, the community of critics are some of the worst cases of deep friend internet brain imaginable, spinning narratives in a Trump-style "weave" [0] that can't decide what the issue is, and can't differentiate between importantly different categories of harm. Most of the time it's vague characterizations of "shady" without elaboration, which itself signals the kind of vagueness that people mistakenly think constitute a completely expressed idea.
That's why this article, at least, by contrast is able to coherently articulate a harm, but even that is fringey, pertaining to pinned comments did not comply with "CARU’s Ad Guidelines’." But at least, it models what it looks like to present a coherently stated harm.
0: The Weave: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/us/elections/trump-speech...
Hard work is somewhat necessary at the start to buy you legitimacy (aka school & diploma) but it's not really a big difference maker after that.
In fact, I would say that if you work hard and produce great work this pretty much guarantees that you'll never evolve past a certain level.
I think that's actually the major difference maker for rich people: they got there that way and demonstrate how things work to their children who integrate the concept intuitively.
Even if 215M in revenue on chocolate bars suggests that they might be perfectly capable of funding all their $5K and $10k givaways.
The credibility is ranking. The ranking is a function of engagement. The engagement is a function of human nature. Things delightful, shocking, or unusual usually strike that chord. Sprinkle capitalism into the mix and people become professionally delightful, shocking, or unusual.
I don't think the ranking algorithms are the problem here.
Not so directly, but that's the effective result.
This is also why minors can’t sign contracts, why broadcasts television used to only show more mature content after prime time, and all of the other ways children have historically been protected.
This isn’t about capitalism among equal parties.
- William Rockefeller Sr.
Is it though? We're talking about kids whose brains aren't fully developed yet. IMO there's a certain genius in marketing to kids, as they are far more likely to buy wholesale into what you're selling. MrBeast probably does the best job but if you look through kids Youtube there are some really shady folks out there that just make videos designed to suck kids in, and just based off their view counts you can tell they are making disgusting amounts of money off AdSense.
"not a flying toy"
This has been a great learning experience for our son about how the average person doesn't question what is happening or why.
Haven't you seen the way his smile never touches his eyes? Anybody who recognizes MrBeast for what he is should be running in the opposite direction.
SPOILER - Three Body Problem (book, series on Netflix)
I love the scene where the human tells the aliens that humans sometimes lie and the aliens conclude that humans can never be trusted so they break communication.
It made me think a lot what a normal Trisolaran conversation or exchange of information look like? How does a civilization evolve in this case?
Imagination is also form of a lie. You are making stuff up in your head. Without imagination you don't have innovation. Without innovation you are stuck in cave scavenging whatever you can find.
Also a good way to teach your child that being a fraud can make you a lot of money.
Sadly.
I do tend to agree with the findings, regardless.
Indeed. It's one of those "we joined this program so now you all can see we are very committed to ensure our consumers are well protected" non-profit organisations.
It has no legal weight. Lave of legal merit is a feature of a legal argument and is missing if the argument improperly represents the law, not if it comes from a source that doesn’t provide it legal weight. (Since you later say you agree with it. that is equivalent to saying that, insofar as it is a legal argument, that argument does have legal merit.)
> Can’t tell if this is the ad industry attempting to self-regulate?
No, it is a non-advertising industry non-profit doing research and reporting to the public, which potentially puts political pressure on government actors (State Attorneys-General and, maybe, the FTC) to take action (it could also provide ammunition for private lawsuits, except COPPA doesn’t provide a private cause of action.)
Note that a part of COPPA regulation is a Safe Harbor provision which involves industry self-regulation and certification, but that only protects against FTC, not state, action.
Lack?
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-...
I simply do not see the correlation. There are many people in the world that want to make money and do so by providing a great product at an affordable price (eg. Gabe Newell). Perhaps it is better to say you shouldn't trust people that who give you something for free to make money off you.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1njds9z/counterstri...
> Frontiers: How Much Influencer Marketing Is Undisclosed? Evidence from Twitter
> We study the disclosure of influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts and a novel classification method to detect undisclosed sponsorship. Using our preferred empirical specification, we find that 96% of sponsored posts are not disclosed. This result is robust to a series of specification tests, and even a lower-bound classification still yields an undisclosed share of 82%. Despite stronger enforcement of disclosure regulations, the share of undisclosed posts decreases only slightly over time. *Compared with disclosed posts, undisclosed posts tend to be associated with young brands with a large Twitter following. Using an online survey, we find that many consumers are not able to identify sponsored content without disclosure.* Our findings highlight a potential need for further regulatory scrutiny and suggest that researchers studying influencers must account for undisclosed sponsored content.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2024.083...
Now, one could argue that Mr Beast has the means to properly disclose these issues.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-22/youtube-s...
AI summary: "Creator" loses money due to production costs while third party intermediary "platform" (middleman) Google, twice convicted cybercriminal organisation, makes money by auctioning, selling, delivering and monitoring online ads, then taking a cut of advertising spend
Is this data valuable to me in some way?
Almost all of the content I have seen become popular have been highly toxic "relationships" with their audience. It's happening and pretty bad for non-children content, but it's happening worse and shouldn't be happening at all for childrens content.
I mean, we get it, they are a high-margin audience traditionally. Selling garbage to kids makes big bucks. Kids are dumb and they buy stupid things for non-existent reasons. That's why traditionally we have had more laws to protect them and been more vigilant about it. It seems like we've seriously slipped and just kind of thrown our hands in the air and concluded "I guess kids have to get scammed over and over"
Not all evil has to be some grand world-level conspiracy and it can still be evil.
Not as evil and Mary Janes. Or five pennies tied up in string.
> In MrBeast’s 2024 Halloween sweepstakes, Feastables encouraged participants to submit up to 24 entries daily until October 30 for a chance to win $10,000, with a grand prize of $1,000,000 on Halloween Day. The ad copy stated, “$10,000 USD Daily Winner. Enter with Purchase Through October 30.” In very small print was the disclaimer, “No purchase necessary, Click below for details.” The official rules stated that participants must be at least 13 years old with parental permission and entrants under 13 are not allowed.
That shows they clearly were aware of the fact they must have a "no purchase necessary" option, because they added it into the small print. They then actively pushed the "with purchase" line everywhere else.
They knew what they should be doing and then did everything they could to do otherwise to sell more product.
The whole operation is optimized to the gills for maximum engagement above all else, down to A/B testing a hundred different thumbnail variants for every video: https://x.com/Creator_Toolbox/status/1783995589543227402
To be fair, this is apparently table stakes for being a YouTuber at the moment. Maybe not hundreds but definitely several. Veritasium did a video [0] about how he has to do this to maintain enough viewership to keep YouTubing viable as a full-time job.
So to bring in the most views, put out different thumbnails to attract different viewers. Ideally YouTube would have support for this where you can just upload a dozen thumbnails or so, and YouTube figure out who needs to see which.
So does he need to do it to remain profitable or does PE need to do it to pay for all their overhead / etc?
In general, it seems this is a thing that YouTubers feel they need to do to avoid being swallowed, but the extent to which MrBeast does it could well be extreme, and thereby worthy of suspicion.
What you need is some kind of platform on which you could collect those dollars. In recent history the internet has become a powerful platform and that is why we have so many more billionaires.
But what has not changed is our sensitivity to good deeds. If you’re a billionaire, giving all your wealth away is not really going to be appreciated much more than doing some highly visible good deeds that give smaller amounts of wealth away. So why do it? There is diminishing returns for good deeds. You’re better off staying a billionaire until you die, after which your wealth will be distributed anyway.
You could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world. Could probably end or avoid a few wars, too. You’d certainly go into the annals of history is you eradicated poverty in whole areas of the world (which you could easily do, as a billionaire).
> It’s not that difficult to become a billionaire.
Please show us. Then give all your money away and see how that worked out. Don’t knock it until you try it. If you later regret it, that’s OK, shouldn’t be that difficult to become a billionaire again.
You're being downvoted because you're not responding to the comment in earnest. The comment says,
"You could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world."
Obviously, that implies good intention. Your contrarian take sidesteps this for no real reason: you present no argument other than being contrarian for contrarian-sake. Maybe try explaning why you think the logic is flawed.
1. You have to be a shitty human being to become a billionaire. 2. If you give away all your money, you’re not a shitty human being. 3. But if you’re not a shitty human being, how could you have become a billionaire in the first place?
???
There is no way to win with these people.
Please don’t straw man. Engage with the arguments in earnest, with what the person said, not what you imagine they said.
Do you think we're extrapolating too much into the meaning of "decent human"?
So yes, you are extrapolating too much. Saying “doing this is good or decent” does not automatically mean “not doing this is bad or indecent”. You are not reading some “obvious subtext” (as you put it in another comment), you’re making up beliefs and ascribing negative intentions to complete strangers.
if giving all my money away leads to "the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world."
Then it's not much of a step or even a leap to go the other way with it. If I horde all my money or even don't give it all away, then I will be denied that intrinsic satisfaction because I'm not a decent human or creating a better world.
Do you think we're extrapolating too much into the meaning of "decent human"?
Consider this: A billionaire (not even a multibillionaire, just one on the “lower end”) who gave away $1 a second would be giving away $86400 a day. Sounds like a lot, until you realise it would still take them 32 years to give it all away, and that’s assuming they wouldn’t be making any money in the meantime.
Now consider the number of people living in extreme poverty.
Isn’t this the guy that gives out cars to one random person on YouTube while their friends get nothing then films the reactions for megabucks?
This tells you who he is and what his incentives are. If you would like to believe otherwise go for it. My advice simply is to watch out in real life for people you think are good if this is how you judge people.
Maybe you could argue that they aren't financially lucrative but at least help his brand. But he seems to get a lot of hate for making those videos. I suspect his brand would be much better if he stuck to making highly produced challenge and contest style videos
Now there are three worlds we could live in: In the first I am misjudging his videos and they are actually good for his brand or finances. That's the one you suspect. In the second they are bad for his brand but he perceives them as helping him. Quite possible, even if he seems to have reasonably good self reflection. In the third they are bad for his brand and finances but he wouldn't be able to finance projects of this scopes without the videos and sponsorships. That's what MrBeast claims to be true
I don't know which of those is true, all three of them seem likely to me
Doesn't matter. We are literally having this discussion because of the very fact that he has chosen to make these videos. This tells you how effective it is for his brand. More than likely it is a net-positive even if he does get criticism.
One point about giving away cars - it’s not always to someone else’s detriment. He once gave someone ~30 used cars and they had to give them all away (to friends, family, randoms) within 24hours to earn a Tesla for himself.
In a weird way he is turning into the squid game villain himself. He stole their look for his henchmen and also takes on the persona. Almost every video he has made since would fit right in that world.
That and a mix of Willy Wonka.
It's very reminiscent of many crypto-scammers, who flaunted their wealth and talked about wanting to help others become wealthy too, only to eventually rug pull.
But he is definetly flaunting something. I'd maybe label it as flaunting generosity, or the ability to change people's lifes
People tend to have a good intuition for these kind of things. Every time my alarm bells have gone off it turned out they were in fact wearing a mask.
Even if MrBeast were to be investigated by a government agency for similar issues, his business links to noted Trump sycophant Chamath Palihapitiya would shield him from any consequences for his actions.
Its a marketing experiment basically. I think a bunch of people coalesced to answer the question. "So, how could we completely wipe the leaderboard in terms of views/attention and dethrone an entire cohort of competitors in the quest for dominance over people's attention?"
In the process they completely pulled out all stops, if it bleeds it leads, save the children, high risk stunts, and psychological knee jerks. Out of nowhere they play minecraft too? Of course, its popular so, why not. The ends justifies the means. Of course, all influencers do this to a point, but none are so systematic, diversified and approach the question with so many types of content.
People get confused that the Chamber of Commerce isn't a government body.
but also, delegating certain responsibilities to non-govenment bodies does happen too. these then have quasi governmental authority.