The scenes leave a pit in your stomach. In Netflix’s “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing,” two early teenagers are pressured to kiss by adults — a parent and a videographer — on camera. Hulu’s “The Devil in the Family: The Ruby Franke Story” shows the dramatic footage of Franke’s 12-year-old son showing up at a neighbor’s door with duct tape markings around his ankle, asking them to call police.
The pair of documentaries, released this year, shine a light on the perils of child-centered online content. “Bad Influence” examines claims of abuse and exploitation made by 11 former members of the teen YouTube collective “The Squad” against Tiffany Smith — who ran the YouTube channel, which drew two million subscribers — and her former boyfriend Hunter Hill. Both denied the allegations, and the suit was settled for a reported $1.85 million last year.
Ruby Franke, a mother of six, pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse in 2023 after denying her children adequate food and water and isolating them as she built a family YouTube channel that amassed nearly 2.5 million subscribers before it was taken down. She will serve up to 30 years in prison.
Concerns about the treatment of child entertainers have abounded since the days of Judy Garland and through last year’s “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” in which former Nickelodeon actors described performing under harmful and sexually inappropriate conditions. Less examined is the working world of child influencers, who are now speaking out about the harsh, unsafe or emotionally taxing constraints of being broadcast by their parents.
Viewers may be tempted to ask, “Aren’t there laws against this?”
“We have pretty documented evidence of the troubling pipeline for Hollywood and child actors, but we don’t have nearly similar numbers for child influencers, primarily because the phenomenon of influencing is so young,” said Chris McCarty, the founder and executive director of Quit Clicking Kids, an organization dedicated to stopping the monetization of minors. “A lot of the kids are too young to even really fully understand what’s going on, let alone, like, actually speak out about their experiences.”
Child entertainer laws — which in some cases make provisions for minors’ education, set limits on working hours and stipulate that earnings be placed in a trust — regulate theatrical industries. The world of content creators, where an account with a sizable following can generate millions of dollars a year for creators, is largely unregulated.
McCarty worked with the California legislature to draft an amendment to the Coogan Law, legislation passed in 1939 that requires employers to set aside 15 percent of a child actor’s earnings in a trust. In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed Senate Bill 764, mandating that creators who feature children in 30 percent or more of their content set aside a proportioned percentage of their earnings into a trust for the child to access when they turn 18. The law went into effect this year and made California the third state (along with Illinois and Minnesota) to adopt financial protections for children featured in social media content.
Some notable family vloggers uprooted from California for Tennessee in the immediate aftermath. The LaBrant family, whose YouTube (12.8 million subscribers) and TikTok content (the mother, Savannah, has 30.3 million followers) mainly revolves around their five young children, explained their move to Nashville in a post, saying “We truly feel like this is where God is calling our family.”
Brittany Xavier, a prominent TikTok creator with over 3 million followers whose content mostly showcases her three children, attributed her move to Nashville to finding mold in her family’s California rental house.
They did not respond to requests for comment, nor did they cite the new law as the reason for their departures, but commenters on their videos and on Reddit have speculated about whether the new legislation contributed to their moves.
The amendment to the Coogan Law could be a starting point to more regulation. “The law can also be expanded to make sure that kids have boundaries on their working hours and protections in terms of being guaranteed education,” said Mary Jean Amon, an assistant professor at Indiana University who specializes in research on parental sharing and beliefs about autonomy and consent.
That might prove difficult given the lack of boundaries between work and home for child influencers. In “The Devil in the Family,” the Franke children protested rarely having any time off from making content — outtakes from their vlogs showed one of the family’s sons, Chad, who is now 20, being told to answer with more enthusiasm when he was tired and didn’t want to be on camera. “It felt more like a set than a house,” Shari Franke, 22, says in one scene in the documentary.
“For kid influencers, those cameras are ubiquitous since most of the adults around them will have one in hand at virtually all times,” Amon said. “Rather than playing characters, child influencers are observed as themselves, while also being heavily rewarded for pandering to the desires of strangers, and sometimes they’re punished for failing to do so.”
Those follower-strangers represent a danger far more difficult to address. Deja Smith, a stay-at-home mother from the Houston area, creates lifestyle videos for Instagram and TikTok, where she has a following of about 140,000. She shared details and images of her newborn daughter for most of the first year of her life until strangers started recognizing her child in public and leaving upsetting comments on social media. After reading more about the ways users can manipulate children’s images through artificial intelligence and search for personal information like an address through photos, she wiped images of her daughter from the internet altogether.
“I honestly feel uncomfortable watching other family vloggers’ accounts that are centered around their kid,” Smith said. “I’m not interested, and I block because I don’t want to be a part of that or supporting that kind of content.”
Shivani Gonzalez is a news assistant at The Times who writes a weekly TV column and contributes to a variety of sections.
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