It was May 2020 and a teenager sat against a grey wall in a house in the Utah desert. His mother was next to him, holding a camera and telling two-and-a-half million YouTube subscribers how to confiscate their children’s belongings. “It has to be consistent over a minimum of six months,” she said, “and that’s showing up consistent over every aspect of your life”.
“That’s a new rule,” said her son. “A minimum of six months?”
“Have I ever given something back [in] less than six months?”
“Ummm,” her son replied. “My bedroom was taken away for seven months and then you gave it back a couple of weeks ago.”
She laughed. “I don’t think our viewers know that.”
“I’ve been sleeping on a beanbag since October,” he said.
Once this footage went online, hundreds of thousands unsubscribed from 8 Passengers, the YouTube channel where Ruby Franke chronicled her life as a Mormon mother of six. This, they thought, was child abuse. Some called Child Protective Services; others scoured her past vlogs to find other evidence. She kept vlogging unscathed until 2023, when a wounded and emaciated younger son escaped the house to alert neighbours of serious mistreatment. Franke and a partner were sentenced to 30 years in prison. The whole affair spawned an abuse memoir, a Netflix documentary, and a Lifetime film called Mormon Mom Gone Wrong.
Now it appears the Franke affair was just the Dickensian tip of a particularly grimy iceberg. Thousands are still attempting to make inadvertent influencers of their children. Their offspring have no right to the money they make, no negotiating power, and nowhere to turn if their parents are too lax about online predators.
Journalist Fortesa Latifi’s Like, Follow, Subscribe is the first book about the fallout of the “family vlogging” industry. It reveals a widespread normalisation of emotional abuse. “Family vloggers” air the details of toileting accidents and first periods with little regard for privacy. One daughter of an influencer says her mother’s constant documentation makes her feel embarrassed and paranoid, and then tells Latifi the whole operation only earns the family $100 a month. The industry has a darker side, too; some hapless parents may inadvertently be making fetish content for pedophiles. One mother admits the most popular videos on her YouTube channel are the ones in which her children get hurt. “Humans are curious,” she explains, but the phenomenon rings alarm bells. Laws have sprung up in a few American states to protect child influencers. Few of them look actionable.
It will take more than we think to get rid of the industry, mostly because it is difficult to admit that the children who are suffering are doing it for a reason. To woo repeat audiences and capture the YouTube algorithm, family vloggers must work along longitudinal lines while being in equal parts realistic and sensational. They incidentally fill in a larger void in our narrative architecture. It was occupied two centuries ago by the Victorian epic and more recently by the near-dead soap opera. But it has been left empty by a cancellation-laden streaming landscape, the collapse of Hollywood’s continuous star system, and the gradual decline of print culture.
If you look at the full oeuvre of a family YouTuber you’ll see a combination of the hectic detail of Great Expectations and the grand, melodramatic scale of Les Misérables. Ruby Franke was big before her abuse scandal because she gave her audience six bildungsromans at once, and even more in allowing them to extrapolate her output into an immersive story of good and evil. Like the Forsytes and Buddenbrooks, some successful vlogging families have now hit their second generation. Utah twins Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight appeared as children on their mother’s YouTube channel, gained a joint following in the multi-millions, and vlogged through their respective marriages. One now has her own child, who regularly appears in her videos. She has made the executive decision to hide his face, but this hasn’t stopped her viewers from coalescing in the comments to wonder whether he looks more like his mother or his father.
One could argue these continuous family vlogging empires are a grounding force in an otherwise-shattered media landscape. 40 years ago, Neil Postman said we lived in a “Now…this” culture; television newsreaders jumped from one item to another with no regard for cause and effect. Someone scrolling through TikTok might feel disoriented after peering into hundreds of unfamiliar lives in a single sitting. The McKnights and the Frankes are familiar faces popping out more familiar faces. Because their children grow up on camera, viewers can use the footage to chart the passage of time on platforms otherwise indifferent to it; when they document childbirth and marriage, they provide a communal source of ritual where millions would otherwise have had none. Take one step out of conventional social media and you’ll see further attempts to mould the phenomenon into coherence.
People who follow certain family vloggers sometimes discuss them on online forums which support the formation of larger narratives. One of the biggest such forums, Latifi reports, is a 46k-strong subreddit dedicated to the LaBrant vlogging family. The LaBrants are Californian Mormons with five children. Some gossipers think the oldest, 13-year-old Everleigh, has been “parentified”, or forced to look after the other four. They’re mostly working off throwaway comments, but their discussions reveal a collective impulse towards the dark and Dickensian. Our modern Oliver Twist could be the fed-up son of a smartphone-toting Mormon, and we’ll see tiny fractions of his best childhood memories before we spend hours speculating about his worst.
There are stirring parallels between these gossipers and certain groups of true-crime enthusiasts. Take the Reddit community in which armchair sleuths try to solve the murder of six-year-old pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey, who was found dead in her own home in 1996. It has been 30 years and the case is still open; its online followers have proposed several viable suspects, most of whom are directly related to the victim. Followers spend hours trying to narrativise the gaps in the official story; the nature of the crime means these explanations often spiral into domestic melodrama, with twisted motives that border on the Freudian.
One could make a viable case that this is the 21st-century novel. At times it feels as dense, miserable and compelling as the best of Dickens. It exists in polyphonic chaos; its thousands of authors are forced to flip constantly between Victorian detail and modernist subjectivity. They occasionally take a postmodern turn and stand back to admire just how like a novel the whole thing is.
Latifi wonders in her book whether the LaBrant audience wants Everleigh to say she’s being abused. She’s been let down either way: there is simply no scenario in which the internet’s most famous children remain captains of their own ship. If nothing comes out, the collective brain of the internet will have nothing to do but examine every corner of her life, repackaging the story into something darker. If the worst scenario comes to pass, the mass-media vultures will turn it into condoned entertainment. Latifi makes a compelling argument that we should burn this whole industry down. But something will have to replace it.
[Further reading: Clavicular and the subtle art of being hot]
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