The Dark Side of Family Influencers
- DIG 4552
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
By: Brooke Fernandez
Family influencers have become extremely popular on social media. Through media outlets like TikTok and YouTube, parents have been able to generate great earnings through the monetization of their content. However, this has sparked many ethical concerns regarding the exploitation of children.
New laws in California are helping to combat the growing concerns about the exploitation of minors on social media. Serving as an extension of the Coogan Law, this law would require parents to create a trust for their children for the percentage of content in which they appear. Senate Bill 764 and Assembly Bill 1880 apply when a child's likeness is seen in at least 30% of the influencer parent’s monetized content.
As a result of these new child protections, many family channels have been moving out of the state. The Labrant Family and TikToker Brittany Xavier, are some of the more recent families to get backlash over the reason for their decisions to move. Both of these families have decided to move to Tennessee, one even leaving behind a daughter still in high school. It is assumed that this is because in some states, like Tennessee, parents are not required to set aside any money generated from family content for their kids, and there is also no state income tax.
“It’s official. We’re moving to Tennessee! We truly feel like this is where God is calling our family…”
The biggest reason for the new laws in California is because of the threat of exploitation and the lack of consent that a minor can give. A large part of gaining attention on social media is by creating “clickbait” thumbnails. Family channels have received backlash for years for using their children as this “clickbait”.
Most of the time, the content pertains to their children's health scares. The Labrant Family has been known to do this, even one time going as far as using a fan's cancer diagnosis to scare their audience into thinking it may be one of their family members.
While it is not always the case, abuse allegations have been frequently tied to family channels. For example, DaddyOFive, a no longer active page, lost custody of 2 of his kids over a string of prank videos, which many accuse of being mentally abusive. In these videos, he, his wife, and some of the older siblings would yell at and accuse the half-siblings of things they had not done. These arguments would become explosive, only to later be uploaded to YouTube for all to see. This kind of content has sparked conversation about the lengths influencer parents will go to in order to gain traction on their social media pages.
Many cases of abuse by the parents of these accounts have come to light, the biggest being Ruby Franke, the mother of the family Channel 8 Passengers. She used to vlog her and her family's picture-perfect life, and was known to give parenting advice to her audience of almost 3 million subscribers. A new Hulu Documentary series, Devil in the Family, depicts the entire scandal of abuse from the words of her own children. Franke entrusted a therapist named Jodi Hildebrandt, who worked her way into the Franke home, which she believed was riddled with demons.
Franke was known by audiences to be strict, controlling, and off-putting. Instances which were shared online, such as her 15-year-old son getting his bed taken away for months, threatening to withhold food, and other punishments, led to CPS being called on the mother. Years later, in 2023, after nothing was done and the channel was no longer in use, Franke’s 12-year-old son escaped the home to find help from a neighbor, who claimed he was “emaciated”, and “had tape around his legs”. After a search and investigation, it was found that the two youngest children were frequently kept bound and forced to do manual labor because they were deemed “possessed” by their mother. Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt both face up to 30 years in prison after their arrests in 2023 for the abuse of her six children.
Franke, like other parent influencers, shared many intimate moments with the world that her children thought were “weird and inappropriate.” Shari Franke, the oldest child, has spoken in response to her mothers arrest and told PEOPLE, “I’ve witnessed the damage of what happens when your life is put online…There’s no ethical way to do it.”
Although there is no ethical way to do it, it continues to happen. In another upcoming Netflix documentary, Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, it goes through the experiences of a group of child influencers who claim they were exploited and “frequently subjected to an emotionally, physically, and sometimes sexually abusive environment perpetrated by,” one of the influencers' mothers.
There has been an ongoing battle to implement more effective child protection laws, and it is clear that there is an issue in regards to the exploitation of children, not only for entertainment purposes but also for economic ones. There is a pattern of negative experiences among these family channels, specifically with the effects that the invasive content has on the children's well-being. Much of the time the children are the main focus of the content, yet they receive no compensation, privacy, and many times have no say in whether or not they want to share their entire life with the world.
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