this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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There was a YouTuber I used to respect and looked up to when I was a teenager and I hadn't checked his channel for years. Last year I looked at one of his videos after the US election and he was using the fact that it's a dangerous time for queer people as his segue into shilling for BetterHelp. Not a chance any YouTuber is unaware of the issues with it by now, anyone who shills it knows damn well how dangerous that platform is, and I don't think my opinion of someone has dropped as quickly as that. It's bad enough to shill that awful company but to exploit your young queer audience's fears post-election and people's mental health issues and act like they're doing them a favour? Absolutely fuck that.
Never heard about Better Help. What are they and why are they shit?
They're a company that offers therapy & counseling online, and they were fined for sharing their customer/patient data with advertising companies. I think there are other controversies, but that's the one I remember.
I wish they were fined enough to absolutely kill the company, because what they did is absolutely egregious.
Didn't they also get exposed for having fake therapists? Like people who just applied for the role of therapist, but weren't in any way verified? It's been years, but that was the first controversy I heard about with them and it was all over youtube. The fact that they are still making sponsorship deals with creators and everybosy has just seemed to accept them without a thought is super concerning to me.
The other controversies involved their therapists being poorly vetted, and when they entered the UK they were called out for poor hiring practices, ignoring safeguarding, things like that. They'd promise people licensed therapists and link them to crystal healers and homeopathists. They're the Uber of mental health in many ways.
There's other shitty YouTuber-sponsored companies out there like NordVPN but I don't unsubscribe from people promoting them because the issues aren't as well known and the product isn't targeting someone for something as important as mental health. Every YouTuber knows how bad that company is because they all dropped it for a few years until the controversy died down, and the ones who don't care about their fans wellbeing picked it up again as soon as they thought they could get away with it. BetterHelp is just an immediate unsubscribe because you don't get to make a quick buck from fucking with people's mental health and sending your audience to shitty unvetted digital therapy and leaving them with worse problems in the long run. I remember unsubscribing from Johnny Harris (who has many other problems anyway), Yes Theory, and the one I mentioned above was Connor Franta. That one stung because I really liked him when I was a teenager, he came out around the same time I realised I was gay, and coming back to his channel ten years later to see him promoting this to his young and vulnerable audience knowing that they were feeling especially vulnerable after the election really disgusted me. Like not just to promote it, but to promote it to them as something to help their mental health if they feel scared about their rights being rolled back. Especially with them leaking private data, a trans person in Trump's America would be in so much danger having that information leaked by this awful company and you're sending your LGBTQ fans there for therapy?
Anyway sorry, rant over, this company and its shills are one of the things that get me very riled up.
Me too. Sadly they're still going and YouTubers who want their sweet sponsorship $$$$ now have a long page of copium to justify it.
https://m.youtube.com/post/UgkxVcIh5LvQX5gJDVxsJEhcAuyf8CRLF4Dj