If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet in the past few years, I have very little doubt that you’ll have heard of American YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson - better known as MrBeast. The 23-year-old creator is well renowned for his incredibly high-budget videos - whether that’s running hugely expensive challenges based on Netflix shows, or giving strangers free cars.
Regardless of whether or not you’re a fan yourself, there’s no denying that his following is huge. On YouTube, he currently has over 91 million subscribers, and 34 million followers on TikTok. It’s fair to say he knows his way around social media, and that’s exactly what he was discussing with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on 7 March.
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As reported by Dexerto, during the conversation Rogan mentioned how he doesn’t personally have a deliberate presence on TikTok, although he might consider getting into it eventually, despite it being “such a sketchy f**king application”. The two then began talking about how they felt the app seems to take tracking and user monitoring to the next level.
“Have you ever seen the breakdown these software engineers have done on TikTok? Of how intrusive it is?” Rogan asked. He then claimed that the engineers in question called it “the single most disturbing piece of software they’ve ever had to back-engineer, because [of] the amount of cross-platform spying it does”. This is Joe Rogan we're talking about, mind, so, pinches of salt.
MrBeast added that he’s previously felt as if the app had been listening in on conversations he’d had during the day. “I have had instances where I would say certain things in conversations and then later that night I would get in my feed something similar,” he said. “Like, if I talk about dogs a lot and then weirdly start getting TikToks about dogs. I have noticed that type of stuff.”
He also spoke about how the app appears to track your location, and provide content based on that, too: “If you travel to a different state, like even now in Texas, like my TikTok feed will be a lot more Texas content, it’s definitely location-based.”
I’m sure anyone who’s used TikTok before will agree that the app is almost scarily good at figuring out what sort of content you’re interested in, so these worries aren't totally off the wall. MrBeast added that he recently uninstalled the app from his phone, but because of how addictive it is rather than for any security reasons. Looks like he’s still posting on there though - but with a following that big, you can’t blame him for not wanting to drop that.