Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing

Helping your child become an influencer? Or are you exploiting them?

The capability and influence of the internet is so vast that most people, specially parents, have no idea what the possible repercussions are just by posting a photo of your child. Once you put them out there, even for a simple reason such as sharing a memorable moment with friends and family, once a s3xual predator sees that, they can and will exploit that.

Child content creators are booming nowadays and they earn hundreds and thousands of dollars every month, and greedy adults can capitalize on this. The best example is this documentary about the life of child influencer Piper Rockelle and her mother manager, Tiffany Smith.

Clout-chasing

Everything is smoke and mirrors with most content creators, and child influencers aren’t exempted to this, specially if they’re managed by an adult. At first, their content are innocent, made purely out of joy. But over time, that spark in their eyes slowly diminishes and instead of content through joy, it becomes a task, a chore, a job with no sense of accomplishment on the part of the child.

Tiffany and Hunter creates these skits or whatever is on trend right now, including contents that aren’t supposed to be done by minors. Essentially, most (if not all) of their content are done for clout, not based on what the children want to do.

Bad Influence

Unfortunately, on this series, not only one child’s life has been ruined, but 11 other kid influencers have been affected. Whenever a member of “Squad” leaves the group, even for personal reasons with no spite intended whatsoever, Tiffany would make sure to ruin the internet presence of said child. Their followers/subscribers would go down, she would go to lengths to ruin that child’s reputation.

S3xual abuse is also at play here, and the minors doesn’t dare say anything to anyone because they’re afraid of what Tiffany could do to their careers. Also, Tiffany and Piper’s relationship is so fxcked up that Tiffant does questionable things to Piper in front of the other kids, so in their underdeveloped minds is “She’s doing it to Piper, I guess its fine she does it to me, since we’re family.” Tiffany and Hunter (in charge of camera and instructs them what to do) takes advantage of this. Only years after do these surface in the form of this documentary.

Piper Rockelle, Tiffany and Hunter refused to make a statement regarding these allegations.

From a personal standpoint, I could care less about Tiffany and Hunter, but as a parent myself, I’m extremely worried about Piper. If she was so brainwashed that she thinks that everything Tiffany and Hunter says is the truth; or she’s so used to the influencer life that those that she collaborates with are dispensable; or worst case is she’s a prisoner of her mother and of Hunter.

Curious though, everything they put out is for everyone to see, so where was all the fathers of the children involved? They could’ve protected the kids from that monstrosity and prevented that traumatic event from happening. The mothers as well, there were so many red flags that as a mother, they could’ve taken action against it or pulled their kids away from it during the early stages. The parents know what their kids are doing, exposing themselves to the world, but they let it happen nonetheless.

Conclusion

The series was well-made and hopefully could increase awareness for people hoping to get into the industry as well. In my opinion, even if showing kids could increase content engagement, its never a good reason to do so. Their innocence are gone just for views. A good example of this is another documentary with the same subject matter, titled: “Devil in the family: the Fall of Ruby Franke“.