I was interviewed by Semafor last week about YouTube's most "subscribed to individual "MrBeast" (real name James Donaldson) and his decision to enter the Chinese market.
There's little doubt in my mind that Donaldson's videos will do extremely well in China. Big budget and very high concept, his videos are designed to seamlessly tap into the reptilian part of our brains with a pure distillation of attention-grabbing and instantly understandable themes.
His videos have already been clocking up millions of views on Bilibili for about a year on an unofficial channel operated by his mainland fans that Donaldson has now commandeered. Some of the videos that have already been posted to the Bilibili account include lavish spectacles such as 'Surviving on a raft for 7 days - How long could you endure?', '$1 Yacht vs $1 Billion Yacht - Which one would you choose?' 'Challenge: From one year old to one hundred years old, 100 people compete for $500,000' and 'I hired an assassin to kill me'.
A screenshot of the MrBeast Bilibili account.
Donaldson clearly has some decent advisors. His introductory video, which racked up three million views in just a few hours, made a point of using a map of China that included Taiwan as a province. He hasn't been as careful in the past. In a previous video, Donaldson mapped Hong Kong as its own country, but not Taiwan or Tibet. One more mistake like that, even if he makes it on YouTube or X, will result in a permaban inside the Great Firewall.
Several "bullet" comments from scrolling viewers praised MrBeast for using an “accurate” map.
On one hand, the kind of wastefulness and largesse Donaldson features in his videos are decidedly politically incorrect in Xi Jinping's China. An effective rule of thumb invented by China scholar Tanner Greer for predicting what industries or products Xi most detests is if they can be described by a Brooklyn hipster as “artifact of late capitalism”. That’s MrBeast videos to a tee.
But Donaldson will probably get away with posting his videos on the Chinese internet as they’ll be framed as examples of an increasingly decadent West. As I told Semafor's Diego Mendoza:
Donaldson’s extravagant giveaways in the West are contrary to Beijing’s socialist values, and Ryan suggested that Chinese viewers and censors will likely frame his content as a critique on “American decadence” that highlights “the unequal nature of society in America.” Some of the most successful foreign influencers on Chinese social media have been those that depict the “less palatable” aspects of the West.
It's not just the censors Donaldson should be wary of. His videos will be intensely scrutinized by online nationalists for any infringement of politically sensitive red lines as well as any skerrick of evidence that any of his content contains anything even tendentiously insulting to China. I would not be surprised if an enterprising Chinese nationalist frames Donaldson as being a tool of the USA’s "cognitive warfare" on China just as American grifters have suddenly decided last week to present Taylor Swift as a Pentagon psy-op.
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On a different note, Red Packet readers will remember that my colleagues and I took part in the Australian Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media last year. In my contribution to our submission to the inquiry, which I reprinted in a previous post, I made the point that the problem TikTok—and any other app from an authoritarian society—presents for Australian national security is unique and therefore warrants a bespoke legislative solution.
There are 3 main national security risks with the PRC-owned video-sharing app TikTok that Australians should be concerned about. Two of them—data and content manipulation—are applicable to most other major social media apps regardless of their country of origin. The third risk, that a single political party, the Chinese Communist Party has decisive leverage over TikTok, exacerbates the former two risks and is unique to TikTok as a major mainstream social media app.
However, I also noted that even if this bespoke legislation was able to deal with the TikTok problem once and for all, it still wouldn't solve the broader problem we have with a tech ecosystem that allows for our personal data to be sold by data brokers to anyone, anywhere.
Unfortunately, even if TikTok's parent company ByteDance were able to sever access to the app's user data from the PRC, Beijing's intelligence services could still readily access sensitive data on virtually anyone in Australia via the commercial data broker market.
In a new piece for The Strategist last week, my colleague Jocelinn Kang and I explore this policy complication a little further in light of TikTok's latest controversy about their use of a tracking tool, ‘TikTok Pixel’, that logs individuals’ web history and personal information, even when they did not provide consent.
In our view, TikTok's behaviour in this instance is likely motivated by commercial reasons. As we say in the piece, it's exactly the kind of 'ethical arbitrage' that we’ve come to expect from big tech ‘disruptors’ from Silicon Valley.
However, because the data they collect is accessible by their engineers in the People’s Republic of China, it can also easily be accessed by the PRC’s intelligence services. In other words, even if what TikTok is doing is focussed on maximising user acquisition with an eye to their bottom line, there are other intelligence benefits to the authorities in Beijing.
Read the full piece here.