Is it still goodwill if you’re filming? Kindness in the era of social media

This story is part of the December 4 edition of Good Weekend.See all 12 stories.

You can see through the cracks in the fences, Nathan Stafford tells me. We’re driving through the public housing properties of Glebe, a frayed pocket of Sydney’s inner city, weaving through alleyways and peering into backyards. Stafford comes here about once a week to tidy up ­gardens – to mow ankle-length grass, to pull overgrown weeds and to clear away rubbish that’s spilled onto the lawn. Every job he does here is for free. And while some of them stay between Stafford and the resident, others are filmed and posted on his social media ­channels, where he has a combined 7.5 million followers as NathansLawnsAndGardens. You may have watched one of them yourself.

Stafford is a very different sort of social media star. He’s a 45-year-old father of three, a somewhat gruff, no-nonsense Aussie everyman who has built his fame not on workout routines or TikTok dances but mowing lawns. He’s run a ­gardening business for 14 years and in 2016, started ­posting ­videos of himself ­trimming hedges or mowing long grass.

The clips had a simple, ­soothing quality that proved wildly popular, and you don’t have to speak English to enjoy ­seeing an ­unruly lawn conquered. Stafford says his ­videos started to take off in 2022 and now he has an audience everywhere from India to Brazil, sometimes pulling in tens of millions of views.

He still devotes about half of his week to regular, paid gardening jobs, but those days may be numbered. “I’m hoping that soon I will be able to make what I do a full-time job. And be – however you call it – a ­‘social media content creator’,” he says, waving exaggerated air quotes with his fingers. “But one where I can be giving back what I’m getting.”

Nathan Stafford’s millions of followers on social media watch videos of him gardening for free.Credit: @nathanslawnsandgardens

That’s why, Stafford says, he’s begun to put a new twist on his content. Now, instead of just mowing any old lawn, he’ll go to neighbourhoods dominated by public housing, prop up his camera, knock on front doors and ask the resident if they want their garden tidied for free – and then he’ll post an edit of the entire interaction online. Other clips show him approaching rough sleepers to give them money with his camera already recording. “But I’ll always say to them, ‘Are you OK [if I film]?’ And if not, I’ll turn it off.”

After a while spent cruising the streets of Glebe, Stafford settles on a small, art deco unit with weeds sprouting over the edges of concrete paving – a quick, easy job on a damp, grey day. He knocks on the front door while I hang awkwardly a couple of metres back. Eventually, an elderly woman emerges. She tells us she is blind. Stafford ­offers to tidy her lawn, with the caveat he may film himself working, and she gratefully agrees, staying inside as Stafford revs up the power tools. Before we leave, he knocks on the door again with a parting gift. “Put your hand out – there’s $100,” Stafford says, pressing a folded note into her palm. “That’ll pay for the next guy.”

It is ostensibly a kind act. And yet there is something about it all that is making me feel uncomfortable.

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Nathan Stafford is not the only one making videos like these. Short clips of someone knocking on a stranger’s door and ­offering to mow their lawn for free are just the latest iteration of an internet genre that has been described as “stunt philanthropy” – filming an act of goodness and then posting it on social media for it to be seen, shared and applauded.

You might count the Free Hugs Guy or Ice Bucket Challenge as early examples of these videos, though their big springboard came from American creator Jimmy Donaldson, a YouTube megastar known to his 332 million subscribers as MrBeast, who began making hooky, over-the-top video content out of dramatically charitable acts in the early 2010s.

In one particular headline-grabbing stunt last year, MrBeast paid for 1000 people to receive cataract surgery, then created an eight-minute montage of their post-op reactions and released the video under the title 1000 Blind People See For The First Time. Other, less famous creators have filmed themselves handing out free iPhones to children or giving outsized tips to wait staff, camera on and ready to capture that moment of grateful shock and awe.

To their avid viewers – and as MrBeast’s and Stafford’s huge followings make clear, there are many – these videos represent a feel-good corner of what can be a dark internet. To their critics, however, they are exploitative, self-congratulatory and just a little bit off. If you fall in the latter camp, you might question how much the drive to make these videos is motivated by true charity, and how much comes from the quest for views.

Think about it a bit longer, though, and you might start wondering how much that ­matters. Perhaps MrBeast’s motivations aren’t entirely pure, but if 1000 people who couldn’t see before can now, should you care? Haven’t acts of charity always been a bit self-serving? And if social media celebrity is part of modern life, isn’t it better that our influencers promote good deeds than teeth-whitening strips?

YouTube megastar Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, paid for 1000 people to receive cataract surgery.

Whichever side of the fence you fall on, there’s no denying the number of views these ­videos bring in can be a powerful commodity. Unlike in the US, creators in Australia don’t make money directly from Instagram or TikTok views, but they can generate an ­income through ads on their YouTube videos – or earn via sponsored posts, brand deals or the business opportunities a large following affords you. (Stafford, for instance, is sponsored by an ­outdoor power equipment company and has recently begun selling his own merch.)

Stafford himself says he was inspired to start making his own lawn-mowing videos after seeing the number of views they attract. One night, as he sat scrolling in bed, a clip of a guy mowing a lawn auto-played after the ­pimple-popper video he’d been watching – and he couldn’t help but notice the seven-figure view count it boasted. “I thought, ‘I’ll give it a go,’ ” Stafford says. “And then I just kept going.”

In 2022, one of Stafford’s lawn-mowing ­videos went “berserk”, raking in over 120 ­million views on TikTok alone. He saw that another Australian, with the username TimTheLawnmowerMan, had posted videos in which he’d knock on a stranger’s door and offer to fix up their lawn for free. He reached out to Tim and the pair made a video together – sealing Stafford’s new direction. The more gardeners there are out there helping people, Stafford says, the better.

Stafford was inspired by Timothy Parker, aka TimTheLawnmower Man, and his similar Free Mow Fridays.Credit: @TimTheLawnmowerMan

When I call TimTheLawnmowerMan, aka Sydney’s Timothy Parker, he gives me a ­somewhat different rationale for his social media presence. Parker doesn’t describe what he’s doing as an act of charity – rather, he calls it a unique business model in which he can offer someone a free service and get paid from YouTube ads down the line.

“If you read through my comments, people are saying, ‘You’re an angel,’ ‘You should be Australian of the Year,’ and all this kind of stuff. And it gives me the ick a bit,” he says. “Like, it’s lovely of people, but … I don’t feel like I’m doing the community a massive service.”

Parker’s day job is as a firefighter, but he runs a lawn-mowing business on the side. In 2020, inspired by content he saw coming out of America, he began posting videos of himself mowing through long grass. That evolved into a weekly content series called Free Mow Fridays, where he knocks on a door, offers to tidy someone’s overgrown lawn for free, and posts the video online. Parker now has a combined 5.2 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook.

‘There’s a lot of people who are out there pumping themselves up. I guess you could call it performative charity.’

Timothy Parker

Stylistically, Parker’s videos are a little ­different from Stafford’s, with a greater focus on the garden itself than the resident behind it. While he also films himself doorknocking, it’s usually from a great distance, making the ­subject hard to recognise – he often blurs out their faces altogether. He also avoids public housing. Parker declines to comment on Stafford specifically, but says he doesn’t like where the social media trend has gone – it has, he feels, been “bastardised”, which has caused him to start pulling back on doorknock videos.

“There’s a lot of people making these videos who are out there pumping themselves up. I guess you could call it performative charity – not being 100 per cent true to the fact that, hey, they make their income from this. It’s not just community service.”

And he doesn’t love the way ­creators package their content in pursuit of views – using shock tactics to quickly grab attention and stop the ever-scrolling thumb. “It irks me a little bit when I see some of the people being used in the thumbnails of the videos – you’re seeing them hugging a disabled person or something,” Parker says. “It just feels a little bit, what’s the word? Exploitative. It feels exploitative.”

Parker isn’t the only social media star who has fallen out of love with the genre he helped create. Harrison Pawluk was one of the first big creators in Australia to post stunt-philanthropy videos – and in 2022 filmed himself staging what he termed a “random act of kindness”, handing a bunch of flowers to an older woman sitting alone in a Melbourne food court. The resulting video went viral and, a few months later, the woman at the centre of it spoke out in a radio interview to say she felt “dehumanised” by learning she’d become an unconsenting ­internet star.

Two years later, Pawluk says he feels regret over not just that video but his role in spurring the trend at all. “I think that now, especially, it’s probably best just to do kind things in ­private,” Pawluk tells me via Zoom from his home in Melbourne, fidgeting in his chair as we speak. “I don’t think everyone really needs to know.”

Pawluk started creating kindness videos in about mid-2022, he says, to spread positivity and make content he could feel good about. At first, it worked – his videos amassed millions of views and he felt great. But the bigger his videos got, the more others started to copy them. That, he thinks, is where the trend started to go awry.

A few months after a video of Harrison Pawluk giving a woman flowers in Melbourne went viral, the recipient said she felt “dehumanised” when she learnt she’d become an unconsenting online star.

“If you’re in the 1 per cent in any niche on social media, you’ve got a matter of months before that just becomes incredibly saturated,” says Taylor Reilly, Pawluk’s young, blonde and peppy talent agent, also on our call. “And that’s what happened with the kindness stuff, which is once Harrison started getting tens of ­millions of views on videos, there were so many creators that saw the easy win and then it started being done not for the right reasons.”

The videos started to become, Reilly feels, “clickbaity” – for instance, creators filming themselves handing a $50 note to homeless people “in a way that felt really manipulative and very disingenuous”. So about eight months after he started, Pawluk stopped making kindness videos. “As I’ve gotten older, and the more I’ve seen this sort of type of content develop, it just doesn’t sit right with me,” he shrugs.

‘The comment that I hate the most is, “You wouldn’t do this if you weren’t filming.” ’

Nathan Stafford

It’s not all bad, though. Pawluk has kept his eye on where the genre has gone since he bowed out of it, and says the sort of public-shot videos he made are less popular. The dominant trend in the philanthropy space today is creators using their platforms to raise money using GoFundMe – helping those who, say, need to pay for medical treatment.

James Hennessy, co-host of the tech business and internet culture-focused podcast Down Round, has long kept his eye on the stunt-­philanthropy trend. He agrees that the genre is starting to die out – or, at least, evolving away from the videos where a stranger is surprised by an act of kindness. Which might say something about the true motives of the creators involved.

“Everyone’s packing up and moving to the next great content format that’s going to get them a lot of views,” Hennessy says. “I think it’s potentially telling that people will flock to the next thing – it’s like, ‘Well, OK, did you really care about that stuff? Or did you just care about how good it was for your brand or how good it was for your reach?’ ”

Nathan Stafford knows he has nay­sayers – he sees them in the comments section every day. “I’ve had people say that I’m an ­effing piece of …” he says, cutting himself off before swearing. “I think the comment that I hate the most is, ‘You wouldn’t do this if you weren’t filming.’ I hate that one, because so much I do doesn’t make it [online].”

Stafford estimates that he doesn’t post about 40 per cent of the free jobs he does – and, sure enough, he left his phone in his pocket during the clean-up I witnessed in Glebe.

When he does share ­videos, Stafford says, it can “bring attention to some things that I want change on, that a lot of people want change on”. For example, he is frustrated that government services don’t do a better job of maintaining their properties and he recently scored a ­meeting with NSW Housing Minister Rose Jackson to discuss the matter. He’s used his platform to try to secure NDIS funding for a man he met doing these clean-ups. Plus, he thinks that when he helps people, “they see for a few ­minutes that someone gives a shit.”

Stafford also concedes that, emotionally at least, he gets something out of it. He has what he describes as a chequered past, including a stint of homelessness in his youth, before he received life-altering help from the Salvation Army. Doing these videos “makes me feel ­better about me”, he says – a way of paying it forward.

Before we leave Glebe, as he chucks his tools back into the truck, I have the chance to ­quickly ask the lady whose lawn Stafford tidied up what she thought of him offering free work. “I thought it was nice,” she says, her eyes visibly welling after receiving the money he gave her. “I’m 75 years old, I’m just on the ­pension at the moment, and things are quite tough.” And, I press, if Stafford had filmed and posted the job online – how would that make her feel?

“Oh, I have no problem with that,” she says.

Stafford himself is a little mystified by what may be a very Australian urge – to be sceptical of those publicly trying to do good. “How can that be negative, helping someone else instead of worrying about yourself?” he asks at the end of our morning together, before heading to the next job. “I try to use my platform to show – I don’t talk, I do.”

If the world of social media does lose interest in philanthropy videos, the true test may be what he – and the others making this type of content – does next.

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