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MrBeast Takes Out Online Ads to Wish Himself Happy Birthday

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The YouTube mogul took out an ad campaign on X-formerly-Twitter to wish himself a happy 27th trip around the sun.

It's an unwritten rule in some crankier circles online that after 21, your birthdays should be quiet, humble affairs shared with friends and family. Sure, there can be some exceptions for the big ones. But in this day and age, it could be seen as a bit ostentatious to make a spectacle out of, say, your 27th birthday.

That's evidently not a rule Jimmy "MrBeast" Smith follows, if his birthday posts are any indication.

Earlier today, the YouTube mogul took out an ad campaign on X-formerly-Twitter to wish himself a happy 27th trip around the Sun.

"Happy Birthday MrBeast!" the simple post read.

Thanks to his self-promotion, the post gathered nearly 2.5 million views in just under six hours. The replies were full of well-wishers from accounts like ALF Token — an ALF themed cryptocurrency — to @GodsPURP0SE, who wrote "Happy Birthday Dude!! Love your content and what you do for people in need around the world. God bless you and your journey through life."

There were plenty of critics, too, who likely only saw the post thanks to Smith's boost. "Did you really buy an ad so people can say happy birthday to you?" one poster asked. "Is that like not weird to you?"

Advertising on X-formerly-Twitter is a costly move — likely one of the reasons Musk is struggling to sell ads. Though we don't know if MrBeast made any back-door marketing deals to post content on Elon Musk's social media platform, we do know that most promoted ads cost between $0.26-$1.50 per action, according to WebFX, a digital marketing blog.

With over 49,000 likes, 6,500 comments and 3,500 retweets at the time of writing, we can estimate this birthday post cost somewhere between $15,340 on the low end, to a whopping $88,500 on the high end. And that's just in the first six hours.

Again, this is assuming Musk didn't put his fingers on the scale. In 2023, it was revealed that MrBeast was one of a handful of VIP accounts secretly boosted by Musk, who had recently taken over the platform. Those VIP accounts had their posts pushed to the top, however, in a way that made them look organic — no "ad" tag like the one plastered on Smith's birthday post.

What followed Musk's takeover was nothing short of a mass exodus of advertisers from the platform.

By September 2024, only 4 percent of marketers polled said that X provided brand safety as the platform became overrun with extremists, spam bots, and conspiracy cranks. That fall-off in ad revenue came with a rise in low-rent junk ads by dropshipping companies and Neo-nazis (Musk is reportedly recruiting PR specialists to help reform the brand image of the ailing platform.)

More recently, Smith teased that he "might actually own this platform soon," after Musk volunteered to be part of a "100 men vs 1 gorilla" MrBeast video.

Unfortunately for those fed up with the billionaire's reign over the social media app, those comments were definitely tongue-in-cheek — Musk probably won't be handing over the keys anytime soon.

Still, it'd make a great present for the birthday boy.

More on MrBeast: Allegations Keep Piling Up Against MrBeast

The post MrBeast Takes Out Online Ads to Wish Himself Happy Birthday appeared first on Futurism.

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MrBeast Takes Out Online Ads to Wish Himself Happy Birthday

Change to Twitter Suggests Elon Musk Is Panicking Over Users Leaving for Bluesky

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X owner Elon Musk appears to be spooked by the flow of users leaving the social media platform in favor of alternatives like BlueSky.

Nothing to See

X owner Elon Musk appears to be spooked by the continuous flow of users leaving the social media platform in favor of alternatives like BlueSky and Meta's Threads.

In a surprising move last week, Musk announced that the platform would start allowing users to hide likes, shares, and reposts — a suspicious decision that feels like a bid to conceal the platform's waning energy.

"You can now hide engagement buttons and numbers below each post and interact with posts through custom swipe gestures!" X app developer May Ly tweeted last week.

Musk himself resorted to an odd excuse for the new feature.

"It's much cleaner with engagement numbers turned off," he wrote. "You can still see view count if you care."

Grass Greener

Why Musk would suddenly care about a "cleaner" user interface is a bit of a mystery. Ever since taking over the social media platform in 2022, the company has littered the network with a confusing array of colored checkmarks, unnecessary info, and a barrage of disruptive ads.

But it doesn't take much reading between the lines to wonder if X is paying attention to the astronomic rise of Twitter alternatives BlueSky and Threads. Over the past week alone, BlueSky's daily active users have soared to 3.5 million, a massive 300 percent increase since Election Day, according to Similarweb.

As of earlier this month, Threads had a whopping 275 million monthly active users. But thanks to its breakneck momentum, Bluesky is starting to close the gap where it matters.

Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is anxiously paying attention, with many former Twitter power users choosing Bluesky instead of Threads in the wake of the election.

Meanwhile, Musk's X has implemented a number of user-hostile policy changes, from requiring users to opt out of having their posts be used to train the platform's AI chatbot to dismantling the block function, thereby opening the floodgates for even more harassment.

Hate speech and even child sexual abuse material have run rampant on X ever since Musk took over, turning the platform into a hellhole of disinformation and exploitation.

Last week, Musk also appeared to confirm that X was actively throttling the visibility of posts that include external links, a sign that the platform could be looking for ways to shut out outside news.

In short, who could blame users for running away?

More on Bluesky: Zuckerberg Seems Genuinely Alarmed by the Explosive Growth of Bluesky

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Change to Twitter Suggests Elon Musk Is Panicking Over Users Leaving for Bluesky

Trump Posts AI-Generated Image of Kamala Harris as Joseph Stalin, But Instead It Just Looks Like Mario

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Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris designed to invoke Joseph Stalin — but she actually looked much more like Mario.

MAGA's AI onslaught continues.

This weekend, doubling down on accusations that presidential contender Kamala Harris is a Marxist communist (she isn't), former president Donald Trump took to Truth Social to boost a clearly AI-generated image of Harris donned in communist attire, Stalinesque mustache and all.

It wasn't the first time that Trump has used AI to attack Harris. Last month, days after falsely accusing his rival of using AI to fake the appearance of large crowds greeting her at a campaign stop — and, in the process, arguing that a presidential candidate using AI to create fake images should warrant disqualification on "election interference" grounds — Trump posted an AI-drawn image of a red-clad Harris speaking to a herd of Soviet-like figures, a hammer-and-sickle flag waving overhead.

It is, however, the first time he's boosted propaganda that makes his opponent look like the iconic Nintendo character Mario. Here we go!

The image was taken from a Substack post by a writer who works at the Gateway Pundit, a far-right digital publisher notorious for publishing stories promoting baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (copious evidence, and many judges he appointed, have found those claims to be false.) Trump reposted the image and a link to the Substack post — which described Harris as a "rock-ribbed socialist" — without comment.

The image is ridiculous, of course. It doesn't look at all real, and as netizens pointed out on social media, the fake Harris' fictional stache moreso invokes the vibe of Nintendo's beloved cartoon plumber than it does the feared Soviet dictator.

"The only thing this post makes me wanna do is vote for Kamala," wrote one X user, "and then play Super Mario World on my old Super Nintendo system."

"BREAKING," added comedian Jason Selvig, "Donald Trump accuses Kamala Harris of being a heroic plumber who saved Princess Peach from Bowser and his evil Koopa army."

Convincing or not, though, the image does highlight the reality that generative AI — particularly Elon Musk's guardrail-free Grok model — is increasingly being used as an easy-bake propaganda oven. After all, not all image-based propaganda is expressly designed to look real. It's often cartoonish and exaggerated by nature, and in this case, doesn't exactly look like something intended to sway staunchly blue voters from Harris' camp. Rather, this sort of propagandized image, while supporting a broader Trumpworld effort to portray Harris as a far-left extremist, reads much more like a deeply partisan appeal to the online MAGA base.

To wit, though many self-avowed Harris voters mocked the fake picture, the likes of right-wing X poster Phillip "Catturd" Buchanan latched onto it — as did his followers, who responded with quips about "Comrade Kamala" and, in several cases, AI-generated images of their own.

Trump wasn't the only far-right figure to employ AI this weekend to further communist allegations against Harris. On Monday, in response to an X post from the Harris campaign that referenced Trump's vow to be dictator on "day one" of his second term, X owner Musk used the platform he bought in 2022 to share his own AI image of Harris decked out in communist garb.

"Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one," Musk sarcastically captioned the image. "Can you believe she wears that outfit!?" The post has yet to receive a Community Note indicating the use of AI, and is also lacking a fact-check to the false allegation that Harris has vowed to be a "communist dictator on day one" (she hasn't.)

Musk's clearly faked photo drew criticism from users across X, ranging from "Happy Days" actor Henry Winkler to former United Nations deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson.

"Just straight up disinformation, with no parody label or community note, from the owner of this site and the guy with the most followers," wrote Zeteo editor-in-chief and former MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan. "Anyone who claimed he wouldn't use this platform to push rightwing conspiracies and help elect Trump must be feeling pretty dumb right now."

The use of AI by Trump — not to mention his richest and most influential supporter — to further highly politicized attack lines reflects the ever-increasing surreality of the 2024 election, a political contest being battled out on the back of a nearly-ten-year stretch of chaos, fake news, and the endless whir of muddied social media information. It also certainly underscores a recent argument made by The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel, who observed that the "meme-loving" MAGA aesthetic and the hyperreal tone of AI slop are, in the murky annals of social platforms like X, increasingly merging together.

On that note, like Trump's Truth Social-boosted Lenin-slash-Mario image, Musk's X post drew some support in addition to derision.

"I can believe it," wrote one X user in the billionaire's comments. "Kammunism."

More on Trump and AI: After Falsely Accusing Kamala Harris of Using AI, Donald Trump Posts AI Slop About Her on Twitter

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Trump Posts AI-Generated Image of Kamala Harris as Joseph Stalin, But Instead It Just Looks Like Mario