MrBeast Gives 20,000 Children Their First Pair Of Shoes, Sparking Round Two Of 'Charity For Views' Discourse
If a man gives 20,000 African children shoes and 3 million people (and counting) see it, does it really count as philanthropy?
This is the question social media is debating once again after MrBeast, fresh off becoming the subject of Antichrist comparisons for curing the blind in January, released a new viral video in which he worked with his charities to gift 20,000 African children their first pair of shoes.
As with MrBeast's "1,000 Blind People See for the First Time" video, a debate has emerged on the pureness of MrBeast's motivations, as some commenters have argued that the views, brand recognition and potential ad revenue he would receive from turning his charitable work into a YouTube video sullies whatever good his charity work does.
Others have argued that regardless of MrBeast's motivations, which he's stated are pure, the end result is 20,000 children now have shoes, and that outweighs any benefits MrBeast might receive from making his charity work so public.
One argument voiced by Jezebel just hours before the "shoes" video controversy began developing contended that MrBeast's "stunt philanthropism" only serves to underline severe economic issues affecting the globe.
The article implies that MrBeast should use his wealth to address economic realities that prevent blind people from getting an available surgery to clear their blindness or African children from getting shoes. The article notably cites a tweet by user @itsmebee9402 to make the point.
This round of discourse will likely do little to change MrBeast's charitable content, nor create a consensus on whether it's "good" or "bad," portending a grim future where MrBeast keeps doing charity work and people argue about it online forever.
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Cannedlaughter
Charity work should be considered neither good nor bad. It doesn’t make anyone a better or worse person. All people need to focus on is the results. It’s awful that there needs to be a situation where charity work is needed in the first place. But at the end of it. Kids got shoes, kids got surgery. Works for me. I don’t like Mr. Beast’s content. But that’s not the issue here. I’m not in any financial position to do that kind of help and it’s great that he can and does.
Peanut970
This is the worst fucking shit. He's literally helping people, isn't this what they wanted? I'm 100% sure that most of these people are just being faced with the injustice of poor people suffering, and instead of doing anything productive about it, they just unleash their anger on the person closest to the video, that being MrBeast.
Gumshoe
I agree with people who say "it's messed up that there are people relying on Mr Beast giving them stuff they should already have", and using the virality of the videos to drive that discussion, but I think when people start getting into fights with him over the fact that he's doing it, they're just looking crazy. He's not the one who put them in this situation, and he's not out preventing someone else from fixing it in a bigger way. As far as I can tell, he's not even making some pont of "now that I've fixed poverty, nobody needs to work on any systematic changes ever again". If anything, it just draws more attention to the bigger problem and gets more people to talk and think about it.
Gumshoe
Even when people are like "he doesn't care, he just does it for money", even if we assume it's true, how does it matter at all? Imagine going up to the person getting a free pair of shoes or an eye treatment and then taking it away from them and then telling them that it's because the guy who gave them the free thing was getting something out of it too and that makes it wrong to give it to them. I get wanting to make a point that these things aren't enough by themselves, but they're better than nothing, and it's kind of nice that the most viral guy on Youtube is someone who makes videos about giving out free stuff instead of about flexing his rich lifestyle, exploiting his kids for views, selling crypto scams, doing creepy prank videos, trying to cyberbully people, or the myriad other shitty things you can do to become popular on Youtube.
Panuru
I don't understand the "these videos generate revenue" argument. Yeah, that's how he got the money to buy the shoes. If you spend 250k on shoes and that video generates 250k in revenue that's used to buy wigs for cancer patients and that generates 250k in revenue that's used to buy prosthetics for amputees…what's the issue here?
DeadSpark
There's that one tweet back in the "Curing the Blind" discussion I always came back to :
"The issue isn't MrBeast helping people, it's the fact that they have to rely on being cherry-picked by a millionaire to get a 10-min, life changing procedure done. Having to rely on the charity of rich people to fix society's problems is the issue."
qx1511
Honestly, if they focused on that rather than trying to directly attack MrBeast as the coming of the AntiChrist, they would have a much stronger case.
OldClover
Reasonable, but in that case I feel like Mr. Beast still isn't in the wrong here, as he's doing his best to help people with what he has
Sadly the solutions are short term, but short term solutions are better than no solutions.
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