By Jeremy Snyder

Using entertainment to encourage giving for health-related causes isn’t new. However, health-related ‘philanthrotainment’ has evolved recently with the help of online content creators like Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast. My article “The Ethics of Online Health-Related Philanthrotainment” discusses how this marriage of social media influencers and philanthropic fundraising can create real benefits for the recipients of these products. At the same time, health-related philanthrotainment raises a host of ethical concerns, including using donations inefficiently, undermining democratic voice in giving, failing to identify and address the root causes of need, encouraging moral licensing behaviour, and degrading and exploiting the recipients of these activities. While the online and entertainment focused nature of philanthrotainment cleverly harnesses advertisement-based revenue, social media, and the reach on famous content creators to help raise money for health-related needs, the same entertainment focused and algorithm driven nature of philanthrotainment encourages – perhaps unavoidably – these ethical problems.

When I told my 14-year-old son that I was publishing a paper that discusses ethical issues related to MrBeast’s “Beast Philanthropy” YouTube channel, I had hoped to connect with him about my work. Instead, he responded with “Isn’t it a little late for that?”. After I got over the realization that I’d once again proven myself to be hopelessly old and out of touch, I realized that what he meant was that, for his friend group at least, Donaldson’s videos had crossed some ephemeral line from cool to cringe and was no longer something they would want to be associated with. But the evolving tastes of teen boys aside, health-related philanthrotainment continues to influence the millions of viewers of these videos and to shape the practice of philanthropy.

This can bee seen in a recent partnership announcement between the venerable Rockefeller Foundation and Donaldson’s Beast Philanthropy. As was described in the press release publicizing the partnership, generations Z and Alpha make up 4 billion people worldwide, many of whom spend 7-9 hours on screens daily. For traditional philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the appeal of philanthrotainment creators is apparent – embracing this style of philanthropy provides an opportunity to connect with and market to new generations of potential supporters. In particular, the entertaining and engaging narratives found in philanthrotainment is a main selling point as this partnership will “use the latest storytelling strategies and content from their and their partners’ charitable programs to make stories about charitable giving accessible, approachable, and actionable”.

While the appeal of online, health-related philanthrotainment is clear, my paper provides reasons why the Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropies, non-governmental organizations, and other stakeholders should be cautious about taking part in this practice. Stories about charitable giving in the vein of online philanthrotainment are certainly engaging for a segment of the population, including many young people and the advertisers who wish to market to them. However, these stories often obscure the structural causes of health-related needs, present often White and privileged content creators as the heroes of these stories, limit partner communities to the role of passive recipients, and develop plot points in the service of entertainment and at the behest of advertisers.

Highlighting the ethical concerns with health-related philanthrotainment and the structural barriers to addressing these concerns is important if traditional philanthropic organizations are going to be tempted to partner with philanthrotainment content creators. It is possible that the Rockefeller Foundation is aware of these concerns and has developed a careful plan to ensure that they don’t reproduce the ethically problematic patterns embedded in health-related philanthrotainment. But lacking evidence to the contrary, there is good reason to think that the embrace of philanthrotainment storytelling by mainstream foundations will simply expand the scope of philanthrotainment’s many harms.

Paper title: The Ethics of Online Health-Related Philanthrotainment

Author: Jeremy Snyder

Affiliations: Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University

Competing interests: None

Social Media: Bluesky: @jsnyder.bsky.social; LinkedIn.