Utah passes new legal protections for child influencers, more than a year after 'mommy vlogger' Ruby Franke's child abuse conviction
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill into law on Tuesday that establishes new protections for children featured in online content created by their parents.
The law, which requires parents to set aside money for their children featured in monetized social media content and allows adults to request content they were featured in as minors be deleted once they turn 18, comes a little over a year after the conviction of Utah-based parenting influencer Ruby Franke on child abuse charges.
Franke's now ex-husband, Kevin Franke, and their 21-year-old daughter, Shari, both advocated in favor of the legislation.
'Vlogging my family, putting my children into public social media, was wrong, and I regret it every day,' Kevin Franke told state lawmakers in February. 'Children cannot give informed consent to be filmed on social media, period.'
For nearly a decade, Franke documented the daily life of her Mormon family in Springville, Utah, on the YouTube channel '8 Passengers,' which garnered over 2 million subscribers. But rumors and allegations of child abuse had swirled in the comments section of her YouTube videos as far back as 2020. Viewers raised concerns over Franke's punishments of her six kids, which she filmed and posted, and included refusing to bring her 6-year-old daughter's lunch to school after the child forgot it and excluding her then 8- and 10-year-old kids from Christmas one year.
In August 2023, the off-camera reality of the Franke household was revealed when her 12-year-old son escaped and rang a neighbor's doorbell, asking to be taken to the closest police station. The police who responded reported that the boy appeared to be malnourished, with duct tape around his arms and legs and scratches across his body. The youngest daughter, 9, was then discovered in the house under similar conditions.
The 'momfluencer' pleaded guilty to child abuse charges in February 2024 and was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.
Shari has recently spoken out about her personal experience growing up in front of the camera in her memoir, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom, and in the Hulu docuseries Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke. In the Hulu series, Shari described her childhood home as 'more like a set than a house' and said that she and her siblings felt more like employees than children.
'I come today as a victim of family vlogging,' Shari told Utah's House of Representatives in October. 'My goal is not to present any idea of a solution to this problem but to shed light on the ethical and monetary issues that come from being a child influencer. There is no such thing as a moral or ethical family vlogger.'
Utah is home to a number of high-profile mom influencers in addition to Franke, including the 'MomTok' stars of Hulu's The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Hannah Neeleman, the mother of eight better known to her 20 million social media followers as 'Ballerina Farm.'
Although many parents post photos and videos of their children to social media, the new Utah law pertains specifically to those who make a living off of such posts. Now adults in the state who make more than $150,000 a year from content featuring children will be required to put 15% of those profits into a trust, which the kids can access when they turn 18.
Utah is now the fourth state to establish legal protections for child influencers, following laws passed last year in California, Illinois and Minnesota. While the California and Illinois laws pertain specifically to financial protections for so-called kidfluencers, expanding on existing state laws created for child actors and other working minors, the Minnesota law also includes a pathway for children to request the removal of content featuring them once they turn a certain age.
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