“We never chose to be internet celebrities. But that made no difference — soon, our lives now revolved around nonstop content creation — whether we liked it or not,” Shari Franke writes in her January 2025 debut novel, “The House of My Mother.” In it, she details the excruciating mental and physical abuse that she and her siblings endured at the hands of her mother, Ruby Franke, who documented practically every moment of their lives for tens of millions of viewers on YouTube.
Ruby Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, are now currently serving up to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to child abuse charges. Such indictments arose due to Ruby’s 12-year-old son climbing out of a window to a neighbor’s house to seek help, malnourished with lacerations and duct tape on his ankles and wrists.
According to Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke, Franke and Hildebrandt’s crimes were impelled by their Mormon faith. While this may be an instance of religious extremism, given that the abuse was viewed as a form of repentance, this case calls to attention the unsung crisis of child exploitation in the form of family vlogging. Her case caused an uproar, calling into question how safe these internet kids really are.
Family vlogging is seemingly innocuous and profitable. After all, what could possibly be the harm in documenting your child’s life stages for an audience of tens of millions of strangers? There are certainly benefits to exploiting your children online. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center study, videos featuring a young child, on average, have three times the views as ones that do not.
But why is this? It is no secret that YouTube has become a cesspool for pedophiles to roam freely. According to a New York Times article, YouTube’s algorithm recommended seemingly harmless family content to users who had previously consumed prepubescent “sexually themed content.” Viewers utilized YouTube’s open, unfiltered comment section to lead other predators to these videos. YouTube’s solution? Keep the algorithm the same, but turn off the comments. Children are still being put at risk by two puppeteers: their parents and the algorithm that supports their content.
An added benefit to content creation is the unlimited tax loopholes. After all, when you can monetize your entire life, anything becomes a tax write-off: your living expenses can become business expenses so long as they’re being recorded. With the addition of brand PR and gifts, all expenses paid trips and significant tax breaks, it is evident that family vlogging is advantageous and highly lucrative.
I have a hard time believing that parents are not cognizant of the predators that hide in plain sight on the internet. After all, creators have access to their analytics and channel demographics on their videos. Hence, they can see exactly who is viewing their content and cater to it accordingly — all at the expense of their children.
It absolutely does not help that parasocial relationships are formed as a result of this practice. The overwhelming love and support (which can come in the form of views, likes, comments, etc.) from fans and public recognition garners even more potentially unwanted attention for the children and enables parents to continue exploiting their kids, who then become trapped in a creatively vicious cycle of abuse.
Family vlogging is inherently unethical and morally wrong because it involves parents profiting off of creating a digital footprint that their child cannot consent to, which begs the question: what does consent even look like in regard to parent-child relationships? Why are children being thrust in front of a camera before they can quite literally speak for themselves or even verbalize the word “no?”
To make matters worse, it is widely speculated on TikTok that family vloggers are moving to Tennessee from California amid California’s new child labor laws. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 764, which requires parents who feature their children in 30% or more of their content to put a proportionate amount of their earnings in a trust fund for their child to access when they turn 18. California became just the third state to do this, following Illinois and Minnesota. Notable families, like the LaBrants (Cole, Savannah and their five children), have moved because they feel “called by God” to Tennessee and that it “aligns more with their conservative values.” While this is all speculative, the timing of the moves amid the passing of child protective legislation is a bit suspicious.
Imagine the most vulnerable stages of your life being documented under the spotlight of tens of millions of strangers. Periods, breakups, braces, you name it. What are the lasting psychological implications of being exploited in the public eye by your parents for that long? How will their relationships with themselves, parents and perceptions of privacy be affected as a result of being recorded during their formative years? How much more abuse under the guise of “religion” are these children being subjected to? Are these kids doomed to end up like the sob stories of our favorite child actors? While this is still uncertain, it is definitely something that needs to be researched further for the sake of these kids’ wellbeing. We must do more to protect these children from being exploited by the one force whose job it is to keep them safe.
Zora Rodgers is a junior studying film, television, and theatre. She's from Falls Church, Virginia and has the pajama pants to prove it. When not watching the TODAY Show or writing, she can be found wearing too much perfume and spending her NBC paychecks on SKIMS. You can reach out to her at zrodgers@nd.edu.
