Weekly Scroll: MrBeast Games The System

Plus! A Momfluencer Horror Story and an Important Orca Update

MrBeast Is Smarter Than Us

The algorithmic face of evil?

Here are two relevant facts about this blog:

• We talk about MrBeast quite often, since he’s the biggest online content creator on the planet with more than 300 million YouTube subscribers.

• We also talk about PR disasters quite a bit - see previous posts on Kate Middleton, Dr. Disrespect, Linus Tech Tips, Chappell Roan, Ukulele Lady, etc. It’s a running theme that nobody on the internet can get basic PR strategy right.

MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has been hit with several controversies over the last six months. His collaborator Ava Kris Tyson was accused of having inappropriately sexual conversations with minors. He’s facing lawsuits that allege unsafe conditions on his new Amazon Prime show ‘Beast Games’. One of his former employees has made multiple videos claiming Donaldson is a ‘sociopath’ who fakes videos and promotes a terrible work culture. His Lunchly branded meals were full of mold. And to top it all off, Donaldson was featured on the scam-expose channel Coffeezilla for some sketchy crypto/web3 venture he promoted.¹

But despite the wave of negative stories, MrBeast seems to be humming along. He’s executing the ‘online celebrity in PR trouble’ playbook perfectly.

Most of the story here is not in what he did - it’s in what he didn’t do. He did not release a series of increasingly regretful apologies for each incident that popped up over the past six months. He did not stare dead-eyed into the camera to recite a long statement. For most of these incidents, he shut up and said nothing, and they ended up not mattering that much.

The allegations from a former employee? Some turned out to be completely false and now the question seems to be if the employee will be sued for defamation. The mold in Lunchly meals? A speed bump for a new product that was quickly fixed. Lawsuits over working conditions and allegations of crypto scams? Just don’t say anything, let your lawyers handle it. The one thing that was truly dangerous to the MrBeast brand was the Ava Tyson allegations, and Donaldson (deservedly) threw her out immediately in a written statement. But in virtually every other situation, Donaldson did nothing and the moment passed. He’s now happily promoting his Amazon show which debuts in a few weeks and making videos with Cristiano Ronaldo.

That’s the dead simple secret to most PR situations. Unless you’ve done something truly awful, people will get bored and move on. There’s always a new scandal involving some other celebrity next week. Refuse to engage, and there won’t be any fuel to feed the fire. Many of your fans will never even hear about the controversy and those who do hear about it won’t care for very long. In 90% + of situations, the right thing to do is to say as little as possible.

I’m writing about this now because after months of radio silence, Donaldson did make an appearance on the ‘Oompaville’ YouTube channel to sit down and address the various assorted controversies. We’ll see how it turns out, but it seems to be another winning PR move mostly because the host is an extremely friendly interview and the video is nearly three hours long. I pay attention to this stuff professionally and even I won’t sit down and watch a three hour long video about MrBeast controversies. It’s a great strategy - once everyone’s lost interest, address the controversies in the most mind-numbingly boring way possible.

It doesn’t surprise me that Donaldson is better than his celebrity peers at PR. He’s a calculating weirdo obsessed with analyzing how to conquer algorithms and be popular on social media. He doesn’t just refrain from political commentary - he’s admitted he tries to have very little personality in any direction at all, so that he’s generically acceptable to everyone. Of course this was going to be the one content creator to understand the value of shutting up.

I Love Free Speech

A Momfluencer Horror Story

One of the foundational theories here at Infinite Scroll is that people will ruin their lives in an astounding variety of ways just to get a little bit of attention on the internet. We’re constantly getting new examples of how this plays out, and I have to warn you this one’s not a lot of fun.

Allanah Harris is an Australian influencer and mommy blogger with a huge audience. It’s hard to pin down exact details on some parts of this story since all of the Harris family accounts have been deleted,² but Harris had more than a million followers on TikTok as well as a sizeable Instagram following. Since June this year, Harris has focused a lot of her content on her one year old daughter’s illness. This illness was something of a mystery - nobody could figure out what exactly was wrong with the daughter. Harris frequently claimed the girl had a rare disease that caused benign brain tumors. But at some point in mid-November, healthcare workers raised a flag that Harris’s infant daughter tested positive for Valium and benzos.

Queensland police are now investigating Harris in what could be one of the highest profile cases of Munchausen’s by Proxy ever. We’re still in the phase where everything is ‘alleged’, but what appears to have happened is Harris deliberately drugging her infant daughter in order to make her appear ill for social media posts. This was apparently caught when nurses that followed Harris’s TikTok account noticed discrepancies and odd behavior in her posts, and decided to run a toxicology report.

I’m struggling to communicate how fucked up this is. It’s not just that she allegedly drugged an infant for months. Harris, according to the allegations, was apparently so convincing in her insistence that her daughter had brain tumors that doctors performed exploratory brain surgery on her TWICE. It was after the second surgery found nothing that apparently some nurses in the hospital got suspicious. Her daughter does now have real medical problems and routinely has seizures - because she was drugged into them. Meanwhile Harris was doing ‘shopping haul’ videos from her daughter’s hospital room and raising money off the back of her infant. Her daughter’s illness was the center of her content for much of the last year, and she raised more than $60,000 in sympathy donations.

This is just as bad as the Ruby Franke case from 2023 that we covered in No Ethical Momfluencers. I continue to believe that, as the title of that post implies, there is essentially no way to ethically include your kids in your content. It’s fine to put a few photos of your kids on Instagram, sure. Put that 5th grade graduation video on Facebook for PopPop to see. But there’s a line crossed when you start to include your children in capital-C Content. It’s a deeply unethical thing to do and while this is an extreme case, I think we’d all be better off if we kept young kids far away from social media fame.

Links

• Two additional recommendations to add on to this weekend’s post on web fiction: 17776 and the SCP Foundation. 17776 is a trippy multimedia journey through what American football looks like in the year 17,776. It’s bizarre and great and you’ve never read anything like it. The SCP Foundation is a series of disconnected stories about anomalous phenomena and the government spooks who Secure, Contain and Protect us from them. Both highly recommended!

• Remember when mega-star streamer Dr. Disrespect was kicked off Twitch and later YouTube for sexting/grooming a minor? You’re going to be shocked, scandalized and stunned to learn that he’s now signed a deal with right-wing video platform Rumble.

• Meet EmilyCC, the Twitch streamer who has been continuously live for THREE YEARS. Folks, do not do this. Yet another example of how posting is the most powerful force in the universe.

• Remember the influencer who sued another influencer for ripping off her aesthetic and posting style? The lawsuit seems to actually be moving forward. I continue to think that you can’t copyright a posting style without breaking how the social internet works on a fundamental level.

• Democratic strategists are conflicted about whether to stay on Elon Musk’s X or leave the site entirely.

• Day trading, sports betting and crypto - the three online pillars of the Bro Economy.

• Corporate executives must be reading Infinite Scroll, because they’re scrambling to line up appearances on Joe Rogan and other manosphere podcasts.

• ChatGPT mysteriously will not say the name David Mayer, and nobody knows why.

• Oxford word of the year

Posts

• Two sentence horror

• Good cleaning post

• Important Orca Update

• Drill Fights

• The Beauty of England

• Bar Code

1. Being the subject of a Coffeezilla video is like graduating to the scandal big leagues.

2. Archived versions of her instagram may still be available