Being a famous kid has often been synonymous with exploitation – from Judy Garland and Shirley Temple in the 20th century to Britney Spears and Aaron Carter in the 21st. Even in 2025, with more regulations to protect children, when we see a young person catapulted into mainstream stardom, we fear they might be hurtling towards a life with no insulation from the worst aspects of fame.
This is already the risk for children in traditional entertainment industries: TV, film, music, even reality television. But what happens to the kids finding a different and new kind of global exposure? A three-part Netflix documentary, Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, paints a troubling picture of the no-rules world of child influencing. The online ecosystem of kids making content from as young as their toddler years, stage-managed by their parents, is unpicked via the story of one child star, Piper Rockelle, and the network of kidfluencers surrounding her (called “the Squad”) organised by Rockelle’s mother, Tiffany Smith, and Smith’s boyfriend, Hunter Hill, from the late 2010s.
In the documentary, there are allegations of kids being put through 12-hour filming days, having intimate personal moments shared to millions of adult fans, tween girls modelling bathing suits on camera, and orchestrating physical intimacy between Squad members. Charting the rise and fall – and rise again – of Smith as the “momager” of an online kidfluencer empire with millions of dedicated followers, it culminates in a complaint filed in 2022 against Smith and Hill by 11 former Squad members, accusing them of physical, emotional, verbal and sexual abuse as well as financial exploitation – all of which Smith and Hill denied. (An ensuing lawsuit was settled for $1.5m last year without admission of any liability.)
Bad Influence illustrates that, even if kids aren’t experiencing direct physical harm, they are still being paraded online for an audience of rabid adults. (One Wall Street Journal report last summer found that one child influencer’s audience was made up of 92 per cent adult men.)
There are similar stories of what child influencers are put through by their parents. Bad Influence comes after a year of intense reckoning across children’s entertainment but also about child influencers specifically, with a series of exposés about the unique harm young creators face. In January, former child influencer, Shari Franke published her tell-all memoir The House Of My Mother detailing the abuse she received from her mother, Ruby Franke, who was arrested in 2023 and is currently one year into a minimum four-year prison sentence for aggravated child abuse. Ruby documented the life of the Mormon Franke family on her YouTube channel 8 Passengers, where many of the actions she was ultimately imprisoned for were documented openly for an audience of millions across the 2010s – such as denying her children food and beds to sleep in (one of her sons was forced to sleep on a beanbag for seven months; something characteristic of Ruby’s punitive parenting style). Many former child influencers are coming out to explain the intense pressure they experience that has traumatised them as adults. In an interview with Cosmopolitan last March, one said: “[If] my smile wasn’t as bright as it should be – that would usually devolve into accusing me of not caring about our family. I was told by my mom, ‘Do you want us to starve? Do you want us to not be able to make our payment next month on the mortgage?’”
Given the horror of these expriences, why is kidfluencing still flourishing? Despite its clear parallels to the problems in other forms of children’s entertainment – even the fact that none of these children are old enough to make an educated decision about whether they want their entire lives posted online for strangers, even if they claim to love it and experience no downsides – none of the same regulations are in place. There are zero existing child labour laws in the UK to protect child influencers in their workplace. Some laws do exist in the US, such as one passed in California last year, but these largely focus on financial exploitation – forcing parents to put aside a certain cut of their earnings from content for the children involved to be accessed when they turn 18 – rarely attempting to create safety measures to protect children from gruelling working conditions (often created at home).
This legal and cultural lassitude, demonstrated in Bad Influence, comes at a strange time. Adolescence, another Netflix hit series warning of the dangers of violent misogyny being promoted to children online (in a somewhat inaccurate and sloppy way), has triggered a global furore over the lack of protections in place to prevent children from seeing this content on their social feeds. The issue obviously demands our attention and we need the platform regulation many politicians are so loath to introduce, either because they are grossly sympathetic to Big Tech or simply don’t understand the issues. Audiences’ interest in kidfluencer content means we are turning a blind eye to another major form of online harm.
Without a cultural shift, where the growing evidence of the harm this content causes actually changes how we see child influencers – as victims rather than winners – and without the same kind of labour laws introduced for early film stars or even the teen entertainers of the last few decades, we will continue to hear more stories like the Squad’s. Their work will continue to be pitched as family fun, their sudden wealth and fame framed as good luck. As the journalist Taylor Lorenz says at the end of Bad Influence: “Until we start seeing influencing as labour, these kids are screwed.”
[See more: How to think in the age of AI]
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