A few months ago I wrote about the drama surrounding MrBeast and his former co-star Ava Tyson.

A YouTuber and former employee of MrBeast who goes by DogPack404 posted a two part deep dive series making a lot of extraordinary claims. The most prominent being that Ava Tyson was grooming kids on Discord.

Some of the other claims included cruel treatment of employees and rigging different competitions. There was even something about committing “war crimes” while shooting one of those videos where the contestant has to make it X amount of hours in isolation to win some money or something like that.

All of that and even the claims about the Feastables candy bar containing more sugar and calories than a Hershey’s bar were made up. He really made Ava and MrBeast out to be terrible people who were only in it to exploit kids for money and he made a compelling case for it. It was believable and I totally fell for it. A lot of people did.

Ava quit her job at the channel and distanced herself from the brand completely - she’s probably the hardest hit by all of this. It’s pretty fucking serious to accuse someone of being a child predator. Pretty shitty thing to do if you don’t actually have any evidence - even the so called victims ended up admitting it wasn’t true. Honestly it pisses me off. Of course some dipshit disgruntled manchild is going to make the trans girl a scapegoat.

“Allegations of sexual misconduct (e.g., pedophilia, grooming, child pornography, etc.) between company employees and minors are without basis,” the report said. “The allegations were soundly rejected, including by alleged victims.” New York Times

The investigation was conducted by a legal firm appointed by MrBeast, but it was a legit legal firm and after a months-long investigation they found no evidence of any wrongdoing. I was never a fan of the channel to begin with, so I didn’t really have the sensation of being betrayed by a creator I loved. But with how big of an influence they have it seemed like a huge deal. It made sense for the most popular, wealthiest YouTube creator to be a monster behind closed doors. There’s so much corruption in the world it’s not unbelievable when you’re being fed claims like these.

I guess the moral is don’t believe everything you hear. Especially if it’s from a pop up YouTube channel that only exists to demonize a former boss. Just because something goes viral doesn’t mean there’s any merit to it. We live in the age of misinformation.