MrBeast is the king of the fastest-growing YouTube empire, sitting atop a mountain of over 300 million subscribers and 60 billion views on his main channel alone. Throughout his career, MrBeast’s videos have relied on one central theme: testing the limits of entertainment. As his channel grew exponentially, his content swelled from 100 to 1,000 to 100,000 to 1,000,000 dollars/players/what-have-you. 

By producing highly viral videos featuring grandiose and outlandish charitable stunts, MrBeast seems to have harnessed social media’s perfect formula. Each successful video generates more profits, which are funneled right back into producing even more extreme videos. Yet, the tension between the sincerity and sensationalism of MrBeast philanthropy has propelled him to the center of controversy and criticism. Many deem his videos as exploitative “poverty porn,” claiming that it is not genuine altruism that drives his philanthropic endeavors, but rather performative narcissism. Still, others argue that the format of “gamifying” charity (turning giveaways into spectacles) is a necessary evil, where maximizing viewer engagement is crucial to the business model that sustains future charitable acts. 

MrBeast’s astronomical growth is not due to coincidence; it is carefully calibrated to the demand for increasingly ludicrous content, and the feverish growth of viewers proves that he has struck the gold mine. Indeed, MrBeast has fully embraced the “mad scientist” persona. Recent videos involve people surviving 100 days in a nuclear bunker, in the wilderness, or in solitary conditions, sacrificing over three months to compete for huge cash prizes. For every person outraged by safety concerns, hundreds more are drawn to the exhilarating risk. 

The attention given to controversy is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the “Reaction Economy,” a term coined by William Davies, where our reactions become the basic commodity of the internet. Participants’ reactions in MrBeast videos elicit subsequent reactions from viewers, where ‘hate’ and ‘like’ comments in YouTube algorithms are aggregated in the same “engagement” statistic. The more interactions, the more MrBeast grows and grows and grows. Is MrBeast willing to compromise his morals to fuel his audience’s insatiable and ever-growing curiosity? Or will he let his “can’t stop, won’t stop” mindset slowly erode the unspoken boundaries of online content as we know it? 

While MrBeast’s philanthropic intent or conspiracies of whether his videos are scripted might be interesting questions to debate, we must shift our focus to the far more interesting phenomenon at play: MrBeast challenge videos are beginning to mirror unethical scientific experiments, whether by exploiting power dynamics or subjecting participants to extreme tests of endurance. 

The most infamous study on power dynamics is Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. In his psychological study, male volunteers were randomly assigned as prisoners or guards. As the study progressed, ‘guard’ participants assumed their ‘authority’ and inflicted psychological abuse on ‘prisoner’ participants, causing the study to end after six days. Nowadays, the legacy of the Stanford Prison Experiment warns against unethical experiment methods, power dynamics, and demand bias, where participants form an interpretation of the experiment’s purpose and subconsciously change their behavior to fit that interpretation. In the context of MrBeast videos, the constant filming of volunteer participants creates a power dynamic that might shape participants’ behavior as they subconsciously conform to expectations of a more “successful” video. While YouTube videos are not equivalent to peer-reviewed academic experiments, a comparable dynamic exists between participant and researcher, volunteer and MrBeast. Although MrBeast competitors are given the choice to leave, the pressure of feeling responsible for the outcome and virality of a MrBeast video denies people the ability to freely withdraw participation. Additionally, by dangling a cash prize incentive in front of competitors, MrBeast strips agency from people who are compelled not to leave even when uncomfortable. 

Moreover, some production sets on MrBeast videos are reminiscent of white torture and solitary confinement. White torture, used by the Iranian government on political dissidents, is a form of psychological torture where individuals are subject to sensory deprivation and lack of mental stimulation for prolonged periods. Individuals are subjected to artificial light for twenty-four hours every day and deprived of all human interaction to break their will without resorting to physical abuse. 

Recent MrBeast challenges seem to be inspired by these methods, crossing the line into dangerous real-time human experiments with no scientific guidelines, ethical principles, or safety requirements. One former MrBeast employee, Jake Weddle, brought forth accusations of a challenge that subjected him to sleep deprivation. While filming the unreleased “test-run” solitary challenge, Weddle claimed that the production crew did not turn off bright lights in order to film time-lapse shots and keep the cameras rolling. As Weddle pointed out, intentionally forcing sleep deprivation violates the 1949 Geneva Convention on Basic Human Rights because it is categorized as “cruel and inhuman treatment.” While these challenges demand less physically strenuous activities (although other MrBeast challenges do), they risk permanent damage to participants’ mental health by subjecting them to socially isolated conditions. 

Because participants are filmed for most, if not the entire time, they have no moments of relaxation or privacy. The state of constant surveillance subjects individuals to background stress and mental exhaustion because they are aware that their actions and reactions are recorded. Background stressors are subtle and integrated into an environment, yet persistent exposure to low-intensity stress can accumulate to cause chronic health effects. Being filmed for a prolonged period can also be dehumanizing, since participants sacrifice their sacred privacy and expose their vulnerable moments for the amusement of strangers. 

One man’s experience warns of the dystopia of filming individuals, even consensually, for entertainment. Japanese comedian Nasubi was a contestant on the controversial Japanese reality TV show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen in the late 90s. For 15 months, he was filmed naked, starving, and alone, surviving solely off of magazine contest prize winnings. Though he signed a contract agreeing to the terms of the TV show, he was unaware that he was filmed, completely naked, to an audience of 17 million every Sunday night. At the end of the show, Nasubi was blindly relocated to a final room. Suddenly, the walls of the room fell, revealing that he was in a box, on a stage, facing a massive audience applauding his “performance.” Nasubi’s experience demonstrates how long-term filming flattens real people into two-dimensional characters who matter only when cast onto a screen. 

Furthermore, the financial incentive poses an ethical dilemma: is a person’s choice to participate, if for a cash prize, enough to absolve MrBeast of ethical and safety concerns? How far are people willing to go to win a big check? While MrBeast’s challenges are voluntary, that voluntariness is compromised by the cash-prize incentive or, perhaps more accurately, coercion. This dynamic invites MrBeast to employ a carrot-on-a-stick method to keep videos going for longer if participants are willing to compete for larger cash prizes. The desire to win a life-changing sum of money can push participants to disregard their well-being, which is part of MrBeast’s “pushing thru no” philosophy. What used to be an admirable, strong-willed quality of a passionate creator is now a nightmarish justification for pushing people past their limits for the sake of entertainment. 

However, MrBeast is not bound by ethical codes or the regulatory oversight of an Institutional Review Board; he is governed only by YouTube algorithms and Twitter’s moral compass. 

It is important to remember that MrBeast is part of the “extreme entertainment industry.” We cannot demand morality when his guiding principles revolve around money and online engagement. When the sole purpose of his channel is to meet the inflating expectations of people who crave extreme content, we should not be surprised that his videos are embellished, scripted, or straight-up rigged. A channel growing at mammoth levels of success would logically not want to ruin its momentum with a boring video. It would be a misstep for our moral outrage to be directed at behind-the-scenes production strategies instead of the broader implications of the ethical violations in his videos. 

Is the harm done to video participants worth 15 minutes of clickbait entertainment for lethargic viewers, who slip back into ennui once the video ends? The rise of MrBeast’s YouTube empire raises serious concerns about our generation’s addiction to dopamine spikes. Will there ever be an end to this madness? Or is MrBeast too big to fail?