In 2021, Trevor Jacob, a former U.S. Olympic snowboarder, flew a 1940 Taylorcraft plane far above the hills of Los Padres National Forest in Southern California and made a decision he would spend years wishing he could undo.
Cameras he had mounted to record his flight for an online audience captured him announcing that the plane had engine trouble before he bailed out.
A camera attached to a selfie stick he held recorded him parachuting safely to the ground, while cameras fixed to the plane captured it slamming into a hillside.
He posted a 13-minute video on YouTube titled “I Crashed My Plane,” which amassed some five million views. As it turned out, it was a confession.
Federal investigators later determined that the plane had never malfunctioned: Mr. Jacob had staged the crash, hoping for online fame.
The attention was fleeting.
The stunt eroded his life and led to a federal prison sentence.
Mr. Jacob is among a growing number of social media influencers who push the boundaries of safety and good taste in the quest for views, experts said.
Influencers, sensing that the algorithms reward extreme content over routine videos, are navigating this landscape, one where outrage, fear and awe hold viewers’ attention a little longer than tamer fare.
Gone are the years when internet fame was within reach for a teenager filming dance routines in a bedroom, or a parent teaching recipes from a kitchen.
Attention is currency, and sometimes it’s costly.
Across the world, aspiring influencers trespass on skyscraper roofs. They block highway traffic. They provoke strangers in grocery stores, airports and malls. They dangle from helicopters, cranes, trains and cliffs for clips lasting only seconds.
Some are arrested. Others are hospitalized. And, in tragic cases, some have died.
Psychologists who study this field are not surprised.
“As the tech has evolved and influencers stand to earn fame and wealth, it is probably not surprising that some people are willing to risk prison or even death,” said Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a psychologist at California State University.
That bet — fame and wealth weighed against the risk of prison or worse — is one that Dalton Eatherly appears to have made.
To his thousands of followers he’s known as Chud the Builder. A self-described “America-first” influencer, he has garnered views by livestreaming confrontations with Black people, which often included racial slurs and harassment.
In May, one of Mr. Eatherly’s confrontational pursuits for clicks almost proved fatal.
A dispute with a man outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tenn., ended with gunfire as both men wielded firearms.
A video later surfaced of Mr. Eatherly on a stretcher with a microphone attached to his lapel.
Mr. Eatherly claimed self-defense but was later charged with several counts, including attempted murder. The case remains pending.
He and his lawyer could not be immediately reached for comment.
The social media platforms TikTok, Kick and YouTube (which is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet) and Facebook and Instagram (which are owned by Meta) said that they enforce community guidelines meant to restrict objectionable and dangerous content and that they ban users who violate their policies.
“To prevent copycat behavior, we prohibit people from facilitating, organizing, or promoting harmful activities,” a Meta representative said in a statement.
Experts who have studied digital behavior and online incentives said that boundary-pushing stunts are unlikely to ease as long as social media platforms reward such content.
“In many cases, that means escalating toward ever more extreme claims and risky behaviors that can endanger not only creators themselves but also their audiences, for whom it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between what’s truly beneficial and what may be outright harmful,” said Jasmina Tacheva, an assistant professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.
Mr. Eatherly is not the only influencer to have courted danger.
In Loudoun County, Va., Sheriff Mike Chapman’s department responded to a call involving Tanner Cook, a YouTuber behind a channel called Classified Goons.
Mr. Cook, who is known for harassing unsuspecting strangers, repeatedly confronted a DoorDash driver inside the Dulles Town Center in Sterling, Va.
Mr. Cook shoved a phone into the driver’s face while a vulgar phrase played in a loop in what was an escalation of confrontational stunts he has filmed in other places.
The driver, Alan Colie, shot Mr. Cook, who survived.
A jury acquitted Mr. Colie of aggravated malicious wounding, finding that he acted in self-defense, but convicted him of discharging a firearm inside an occupied building.
After the verdict, Mr. Cook said the shooting would not change his approach.
“We are going to continue the videos and keep it pushing,” said Mr. Cook, whose YouTube channel has 66,000 subscribers. “It is what it is.”
Recent uploads show him streaming inside stores, falsely accusing a stranger of stealing and of him being thrown out of businesses. A video posted in early 2026 is titled “I almost got shot again!”
Mr. Cook and Mr. Colie did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Sheriff Chapman’s office regularly warns residents about viral challenges and online trends. The pursuit of a laugh, he said, can carry real-world consequences.
“You may think this is funny,” Sheriff Chapman warned, “but this could end up as a disaster.”
The trend stretches beyond the United States.
The British government recently called on social media companies to remove more dangerous content, including videos of users filming themselves driving dangerously, after a string of deadly crashes that were linked to online stunts.
A press officer for Ofcom, the government’s regulator of communications services, said it opened an investigation into TikTok’s compliance with its child-safety responsibilities in July.
“Online content which encourages dangerous behavior and treats it as entertainment is totally unacceptable, and can have tragic and heartbreaking consequences,” the official said in a statement.
A TikTok representative said content that promotes dangerous behavior or could lead to serious injury violates its community guidelines, which prohibit criminal behavior, hate speech, and physical or sexual abuse, among other categories.
The platform has been redirecting videos of dangerous challenges to a safety center page. Violators can also be permanently banned, the representative said.
In France, Raphaël Graven, an internet personality who routinely subjected himself to acts of violence and verbal humiliation for an audience, died last year during a live broadcast on the platform Kick.
Some bruises on Mr. Graven’s body were found during an autopsy but none that could explain his death, French officials said.
The two men who ran the livestream channel, Owen Cenazandotti and Safine Hamadi, were not accused of causing the death but were convicted in August of aggravated violence, incitement to hatred and violence online. Both received suspended prison terms and were fined.
In a statement, Kick cited its community guidelines and terms of service, saying that users “must comply with all laws and regulations in their country” and that violators could have their content removed, be suspended or banned.
The company’s rules prohibit extreme violence, depictions of self-harm, graphic gore as well as content that puts personal safety at risk.
Kick said it moderates livestreams while considering “the full context” to evaluate potential violations.
Today, Mr. Jacob reflects on the lessons he learned from his plane crash stunt.
“I don’t regret what I did because it’s taught me a massive life lesson, and I’ve become somebody that I never otherwise would have become,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that it was OK, and that I didn’t make a terrible decision.”
Looking back, he said there were other motivations, including money, curiosity and a desire to make a spectacular feat a reality. But attention was always part of the calculation.
He decided then that the risk was worth taking. Federal authorities and YouTube concluded otherwise.
“We have clear policies prohibiting extremely dangerous challenges, dangerous or threatening pranks, and other harmful or dangerous acts,” a YouTube representative said in a statement. “For example, the plane crash video was removed and the creator was suspended from the YouTube Partner Program after the incident.”
Prosecutors later said that Mr. Jacob intentionally destroyed evidence by removing the wreckage and lying to investigators about its location.
Mr. Jacob, who pleaded guilty to one federal count of destruction and concealment and served a little over four months of a six-month prison sentence, said that the legal case consumed roughly five years.
The consequences stretched far beyond the courtroom.
“It completely decimated my entire life,” he said. “I was homeless. I lost all my money. It’s been a hell of a climb out of hell.”
For younger viewers, the rewards from creating a spectacle — which come in the form of comments and views — may leave a strong impression, tempting them to perform their own dangerous act.
Often, experts said, younger viewers give little thought to the consequences.
“When you’re younger, you’re thinking less about the possible outcomes,” said Anton Ivanov, an assistant professor of information systems at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. “You’re more interested in the immediate results.”
Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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