No. 1 YouTube Channel MrBeast Faces Child Abuse Scandal

MrBeast, a kid-centric YouTube content creator, is under fire for his friend and YouTube colleague’s association with child porn, transgender ideology, and grooming — with troubling images on social media dating back more than six years. 

Jimmy Donaldson, the face of the MrBeast brand, has long defended his friend’s gender dysphoria, despite Donaldson’s influence on children via his YouTube channel. Before any allegations of child grooming and connections to child abuse imagery, in April 2023 employee and friend of MrBeast Chris Tyson announced on X that he was “gender non-conforming” and on “hormone replacement therapy.” He changed his name to Kris, came out as bisexual, and separated from his wife Katie, with whom he has a child.

While Tyson’s changing appearance had been apparent onscreen for months, Donaldson rejected concerns among parents and viewers that the MrBeast brand was promoting transgender ideology without parental knowledge or consent. As the backlash grew, Donaldson stood firmly with Tyson, commenting on X, “Yeah, this is getting absurd. Chris isn’t my ‘nightmare’ he’s my f-ck-n friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off.” 

Donaldson runs the most-subscribed channel on YouTube with his main channel, MrBeast, capturing 307 million subscribers. He gets millions more viewers on spin-off channels. When MrBeast uploads a new video — which usually consists of dumb but entertaining over-the-top pranks and stunts — it averages 150 million views.

MrBeast has spawned a new genre of YouTube content with multiple copycat channels mimicking his style. Donaldson has expanded his empire to include a fast-food enterprise and a wildly successful chocolate bar company. Last year, Forbes listed Donaldson as the top-earning YouTuber and social media influencer in the world, making a reported $54 million. 

Donaldson’s brand and wealth have been built on a family-friendly image and his ability to eschew politics and personal controversy. Children flock to the channel to watch videos with titles such as “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time” or “Offering People $100,000 To Quit Their Job.” Comments on Donaldson’s videos ask, “When is MrBeast going to win a Nobel prize??” and “I think it’s safe to say that MrBeast is probably the best content creator right now.”

Over the past year, however, child abuse scandals have emerged, which Donaldson now says he’s investigating. Yet Donaldson, as well as other MrBeast staff, cynically chose to deflect all criticism of Tyson’s presence on the kids’ show as “transphobia” against their friend and colleague rather than inappropriate exposure to transgender ideology.

Karl Jacobs, a fellow MrBeast employee who also projects a silly and camp persona on camera, lashed out at those opposing transgender exposure on an internet show kids watch, writing on X, “F-ck the goofy mother f-ck-rs keep runnin your own stuff ” after Tyson announced his transition. Now allegations of underage grooming against Tyson and consumption of cartoon child abuse imagery have emerged.

In June 2024, YouTuber Prism42 published a video that alleged Tyson, at 20 years old, shared a chatroom with a 13-year-old boy in which inappropriate and sexual comments were made multiple times. Screenshots circulating online claim Chris made the child a moderator of the chatroom, had one-on-one contact with him on Snapchat, and sent photos to the group with sexually suggestive captions. Among other inappropriate topics, screenshots allege the two joked about Tyson’s “hentai addiction.” Hentai is a highly sexualized and pornographic form of Japanese anime. 

Stills from the Prism42 video went viral via X on July 22. The child — now a man who goes by @LavaGS on X — initially spoke out in defense of Tyson, appearing to confirm that the interactions did happen, but claiming they were just “edgy jokes” and that Tyson had not groomed him. On July 26, that individual shifted in tone, saying in a new statement, “These conversations should not have happened with people at the age I was at the time; I strongly condemn them.”

That same week, more alleged victims came forward. One, @ImBrainFreak, claimed he was in the same private chatroom with Tyson and LavaGS when he was 15 and Tyson sent him links to porn and hentai.

One former MrBeast co-presenter, Jake Franklin, who went by the name “Jake the Viking” on early MrBeast videos, boosted a series of tweets blasting Tyson before tweeting, “Jimmy knew.” Another self-declared former employee calling himself “Dawson” released a video from outside of the MrBeast recording studio and claimed that “Chris is just the tip of the iceberg and when Jake the Viking said ‘MrBeast knew,’ yeah, MrBeast knew.” He introduced his video witha snippet of the Kendrick Lamar song “Not Like Us,” which includes the lines “Certified lover boy? Certified pedophiles.”

Tyson has been public about his affinity for animated child abuse images for several years. As Reduxx reports, Tyson has tweets dating back to 2016 that include sexually explicit cartoon images of what appear to be children. 

Some of Tyson’s tweets were dismissed at the time as “edgy humor.” They publicly expressed admiration for “Shadman,” who rose to internet fame for drawing “loli,” or pedophilic cartoon images, sometimes modeled after real children. According to now-deleted social media posts I captured, the two interacted on X as recently as 2019.

In one interaction between Shadman and Tyson from January 2019 captured by screenshots before it was deleted, several Shadman fans sent him a picture of an anime character called “Raphalia” who moves between adult form and the form of a 10-year-old girl. Shadman asks, “What is this and why do people keep sending me this?”, to which Tyson responds, “Pls Shad. Pls.”

In another now-deleted interaction with Shadman from 2018 that I caught on video, Tyson refers to a sexualized drawing of the movie character Maleficent. Another user inserted a MrBeast meme under the image and Tyson wrote “Lol, just a random @MrBeastYT meme on shad. Love it,” to which Donaldson replied, “This is all we’ve ever wanted, we can quit now.”

In a tweet from 2017, Tyson tweeted a Shadman image depicting a girl in revealing clothes with braces sucking on a handgun suggestively. The drawing features a sexual comment on the girl’s tank top and a pornographic term tattooed on her leg.

In another tweet, Tyson appears to reference the image by stating, “This is coming from the guy who owns a @shadbase drawing and has it as a centerpiece in his sitting room.” Disturbingly, according to a screenshot I grabbed, the image appears in one of MrBeast’s videos from 2018 that was shot in Tyson’s house. While the video on the MrBeast channel has been edited to remove the section containing the image, copies of the original can still be found online.

Donaldson and Tyson have now issued statements on the scandal. On July 23, Tyson’s statement read, “I would like to apologize for any of my past behavior or comments if it hurt or offended anyone. It was not my intent. Seeing recent events we’ve mutually decided it’s best I permanently step away from all things MrBeast and social media to focus on my family and mental health.” 

On July 24, after other alleged victims emerged and large outlets had begun to pick up the story, Donaldson issued a statement that read, “I’ve become aware of the serious allegations of Ava Tyson’s behavior online and I am disgusted and opposed to such unacceptable acts… I’ve seen enough online and taken immediate action to remove Ava from the company, my channel, and any association with MrBeast. I do not condone or support any of the inappropriate actions.”

Donaldson also said he has hired “independent” investigators to probe the allegations.

Dr. Eoin Lenihan is an independent educator and extremism researcher. His work has been featured on AlJazeera and Fox News. He has also written for Arutz Sheeva, Quillette, The Post Millennial, and The Daily Caller. His peer-reviewed paper “A classification of Antifa Twitter accounts based on social network mapping and linguistic analysis” was published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, and it is the largest academic quantitative analysis of Antifa to date. You can find more from Eoin on Twitter: @EoinLenihan and on his website, www.eoinlenihan.net.