It was May 2020 and a teenager sat in front of a gray wall in a house in the Utah desert. His mother was by his side, holding a camera and telling two and a half million YouTube subscribers how to confiscate their children’s belongings. “It has to be consistent for a minimum of six months,” she said, “and it’s showing up consistently in every aspect of your life.”
“This is a new rule,” her son said. “Like at least six months?”
“Have I ever returned anything (in less than six months?”
“Ummm,” her son replied. “They took my bedroom away for seven months and then you gave it back to me a few weeks ago.”
She laughed. “I don’t think our viewers know that.”
“I’ve been sleeping in a bean bag since October,” he said.
As soon as this footage hit the internet, hundreds of thousands unsubscribed 8 passengers, YouTube channel where Ruby Franke shared her life as a Mormon mother of six. This, they thought, was child abuse. Some called it Child Protective Services; others searched her past vlogs to find other evidence. She continued to vlog unharmed until 2023, when an injured and emaciated little boy escaped from the house to alert neighbors of serious abuse. Franke and a partner were sentenced to 30 years in prison. The whole affair spawned an abuse memoir, a Netflix documentary, and a Lifetime movie called Mormon Mom Gone Wrong.
It now appears that the Franke affair was only the Dickensian tip of a particularly sordid iceberg. Thousands are still trying to unwittingly influence their children. Their offspring have no right to the money they earn, no bargaining power, and nowhere to turn if their parents are too weak against online predators.
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Journalist Fortesa Latifi’s Like, Follow, Subscribe is the first book about the consequences of the “family vlogging” industry. It reveals a widespread normalization of emotional abuse. “Family vloggers” broadcast the details of toilet accidents and first periods with little regard for privacy. An influencer’s daughter says her mother’s constant documentation makes her feel embarrassed and paranoid, and then tells Latif that the whole operation earns the family only $100 a month. The industry also has a darker side; some unfortunate parents may inadvertently make fetish content for pedophiles. A mother admits that the most popular videos on her YouTube channel are the ones in which her children are hurt. “People are curious,” she explains, but the phenomenon rings alarm bells. In some American states, laws have been passed to protect influential children. Few of them are seen in action.
It will take more than we think to rid the industry, mainly because it’s hard to accept that children who suffer are doing so for a reason. To attract repeat audiences AND catch YouTube’s algorithm, family vloggers must work along the lines of being equal parts realistic and sensational. They coincidentally fill a larger gap in our narrative architecture. It was usurped two centuries ago by the Victorian epic and more recently by the nearly dead soap opera. But it has been left empty by a broadcast landscape laden with cancellations, the collapse of Hollywood’s persistent star system and the gradual decline of print culture.
If you watch full OFFENSE of a family YouTuber you will see a combination of hectic details of Great expectations and the grand, melodramatic scale of The Wretched. Ruby Franke was big before her abuse scandal because she gave her audience six bildungsromans immediately, and even more by allowing them to extrapolate its results into an overarching story of good and evil. Like the Forsytes and Buddenbrooks, some successful vlogging families have now reached their second generation. Utah twins Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight appeared as children on their mother’s YouTube channel, gained a combined following of millions of people, and became blogged through their respective marriages. One now has her own child, who regularly appears in her videos. She made the executive decision to hide his face, but that hasn’t stopped her viewers from joining in the comments to wonder if he looks more like his mom or dad.
One could argue that these continuing empires of family jamming are a basic force in an otherwise fractured media landscape. 40 years ago, Neil Postman said we lived in a “Now…this” culture; television news readers jumped from one story to another without regard for cause and effect. Someone scrolling through TikTok can feel disoriented as they see hundreds of unknown lives in a single encounter. The McKnights and Frankes are familiar faces that show more familiar faces. Because their children grow up on camera, viewers can use the footage to mark the passage of time on platforms otherwise indifferent to it; when they document childbirth and marriage, they provide a common source of ritual where otherwise millions would have had none. Take a step away from conventional social media and you’ll see further efforts to shape the phenomenon into coherence.
People who follow certain family vloggers sometimes discuss them in online forums which support the formation of larger stories. One of the largest such forums, Latifi reports, is a 46,000 subreddit dedicated to the LaBrant vlogging family. The LaBrants are California Mormons with five children. Some rumors suggest that the oldest, 13-year-old Everleigh, has been “parentified” or forced to care for the other four. They’re working largely off of throwaway comments, but their discussions reveal a collective impulse toward the dark and Dickensian. Our modern Oliver Twist could be the fed-up son of a smartphone-toting Mormon, and we’ll see snippets of his best childhood memories before spending hours speculating about his worst.
There are shocking parallels between these rumors and certain groups of true crime enthusiasts. Take the Reddit community in which armchair quarterbacks try to solve the murder of 6-year-old pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey, who was found dead in her home in 1996. It’s been 30 years and the case is still open; her online followers have proposed several possible suspects, most of whom are directly related to the victim. Followers spend hours trying to narrativize gaps in the official story; the nature of the crime means that these explanations often devolve into domestic melodrama, with twisted motives that border on the Freudian.
One can make a viable case that this IS the novel of the 21st century. 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 move constantly between Victorian detail and modernist subjectivity. They occasionally take a postmodern turn and stand back to admire how novel it all is.
Latif wonders in her book whether LaBrant’s audience wants Everleigh to say she’s being abused. She’s disappointed in every way: there’s simply no scenario in which the internet’s most famous kids remain the captains of their own ship. If nothing pans out, the internet’s collective brain will have no choice but to scrutinize every corner of her life, repackaging the story into something darker. If the worst case scenario happens, the media vulture will turn it into a sorry pastime. Latif makes a convincing argument that this entire industry should be burned. But something will have to replace it.
(Further reading: Clavicle and the subtle art of being hot)
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