Latest news with #AnUpdateonOurFamily
New York Times
02-04-2025
- New York Times
Their Influencer Parents Used Them as Content. Are They Being Used Again Now?
In the video, we see a boy walk up a shaded front patio in Ivins, Utah. He is 12 but appears younger; his thighs are sticks, his knees knobby. After ringing the doorbell, he retreats toward the street, and by the time the door opens, he is almost out of view, swallowed up in sunlight. 'I was wondering if you could do two favors?' he asks. 'Taking me to the nearest police station? Well, actually, just one's fine.' Before the Washington County Attorney's Office released this August 2023 doorbell-camera footage to the press, it blurred the boy's face — an unsurprising choice, as the video depicts a minor who was the victim of a crime. But the boy's identity was already well known online. Fans had been watching him and his five siblings since he was a toddler on '8 Passengers,' the YouTube channel of his mother, Ruby Franke, which at its height had more than two million subscribers and brought in as much as $100,000 a month. His escape from a house owned by Jodi Hildebrandt — a counselor and life coach whose teachings Franke subscribed to — made national news. Franke and Hildebrandt had abused Franke's two youngest children, denying them food and water and binding them with rope; each was charged with six counts of felony aggravated child abuse and, six months later, sent to prison for up to 30 years. The Hulu documentary 'Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke' recounts this story, but it is striking that viewers never see Franke's younger son's face or hear his name. Whenever the boy appears in footage filmed by Franke and her husband at the time, Kevin, his face is blurred; if anyone says his name, not only is the audio censored, but mouths are blurred to prevent lip reading. The documentary similarly conceals the identities of the three other Franke children who are still minors. The only Franke children whose identities are not protected are the two oldest — Shari, 22, and Chad, 20 — who appear in interviews as well as videos and outtakes from the channel. 'Devil in the Family' is the second docuseries this year to adopt this approach. The other is HBO's 'An Update on Our Family,' about Myka and James Stauffer, an Ohio couple whose YouTube channels once had about one million subscribers. The Stauffers' viewership grew substantially in 2016 and 2017, as they posted a 27-video series detailing their adoption of a toddler from China, whom they renamed Huxley. Huxley soon became the channel's main character; the Stauffers even featured him in sponsored content, like a spot for Dreft baby detergent. But in May 2020, fans turned on the Stauffers when they revealed that they had dissolved Huxley's adoption because of their difficulty in managing his developmental disabilities. In 'An Update on Our Family,' every child's face is blurred. Huxley is altered even further: In a clip where Myka shares images of the boy at an orphanage in China, scribbled rotoscoping animation covers his face and body. He remains penciled out through the rest of the series — a visual echo of the way the Stauffers' own channels began to make videos of Huxley private before the couple announced that he was no longer their son. (He has since been adopted by another family.) The blurring is a gesture at restitution: In concealing the identities of these children, the documentarians are attempting the ex post facto application of a privacy that was stripped away long ago. But the gesture feels shallow. The Frankes and the Stauffers invited viewers into their children's most personal moments, from tantrums to puberty milestones; they grabbed attention with a mirage of idealized family life and profited handsomely. The documentaries expose the dark realities behind that mirage, with a similar goal. Ruby Franke and Myka Stauffer uploaded plenty of talking-head content narrating their lives, but what really drew viewers was their children. '8 Passengers' first went viral with a 2015 video titled 'BABY climbs out of crib!!!' depicting the youngest Franke child — the girl who would later be found emaciated in a closet — rappelling out of a lime green crib. The Frankes incorporated 8 Passengers Productions L.L.C. soon after. For seven years, their children's lives were ruled by feeding the YouTube algorithm. The documentary shows Ruby telling the children that they'll get $10 for each video they 'help with'; over footage of girls with blurred faces cleaning mirrors and baseboards, Shari explains how the home 'felt more like a set than a house.' 'An Update on Our Family' tries to think through the ethical dilemmas of monetizing someone's childhood this way. Toward the end, the journalist Stephanie McNeal, who wrote about the Stauffers for BuzzFeed News, talks about how such scandals might have prompted a broader discussion about family vlogging. Instead, she says, 'people just yelled about the Stauffers on the internet and sent death threats — which, OK, but that didn't help any other children. Let's put some laws into place. How can we make this safe for kids?' According to Shari Franke, you can't. 'I want to be clear that there is never, ever a good reason for posting your children online for money or fame,' she told the Utah Senate in testimony last October. 'There is no such thing as a moral or ethical family vlogger.' Three months later, Doug Owens, a Democrat who represents Salt Lake County, introduced a bill in the Utah House of Representatives that would establish protections for the children of content creators, requiring that parents who earn $150,000 a year or more from social media featuring their minor child set aside 15 percent of the child's earnings in a trust for the child to access upon turning 18. The legislation also includes a provision that children can have content featuring them removed from the internet when they reach adulthood — a step well beyond blurring their faces. Similar legislation has been signed into law in California and Illinois, but its introduction in Utah was significant: As Shari Franke explained in her testimony, the state is a hotbed of family content creation. In February, Kevin Franke also testified in support of the bill — though his remarks, too, suggested that it did not go far enough. 'Vlogging my family, putting my children into public social media, was wrong, and I regret it every day,' he said. He also read a statement from his 16-year-old daughter, detailing her experience of growing up on YouTube. 'You're selling your life, your privacy, your body and stories to the entire world,' she wrote. 'And as a child, you're involuntarily giving up all of that. You're selling your childhood.' The bill passed, and it was signed into law on March 25. 'Devil in the Family' has nothing to say about such legislation, or the broader ethical hazards of family influencing; it is focused on Ruby Franke's individual acts of evil, collecting behind-the-scenes footage of how poorly she treated her children. For years, people turned to this channel, and others, for intimate glimpses into how other families lived; they became invested in the daily lives of the children they watched growing up onscreen. Those children's faces might be blurred this time, but they still serve as content: People want to know what happened to them. The blurs and scribbles of 'An Update on Our Family,' too, hint that the team behind the series struggled with how to tell Huxley's story without doing much the same thing his adoptive parents did. The attempt to excise all these children from footage already watched by millions suggests a queasy truth: We shouldn't have seen them in the first place.
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Johnny Vaughan's banter is unbeatable: best podcasts of the week
Radio X hosts Johnny Vaughan and Gavin Woods tell the tales of 'legendary' historical figures. First up, it's frontiersman Hugh Glass, who was the inspiration behind The Revenant – an ex-pirate who befriended the Native American tribe the Pawnee and became a professional fur trapper. It's a banter-packed, laddish ramble that takes in everything from having sex on a pirate ship to why humans are the messiest creature in existence. Alexi Duggins Episodes weekly, widely available The rise and fall of family vloggers has been the subject of two TV documentaries this year (HBO's An Update on Our Family, and Devil in the Family on Disney+). It's just one of the topics covered in this smart internet-themed podcast from tech journalist Morgan Sung, who is 'chronically online' so you don't have to be. Hannah J Davies Widely available, episodes weekly This troubling investigation shines a light on the problem the US police system has with confidential informants – and how the secrecy around them lets the cops operate without oversight or regulation. Its journey into the drug war in Massachusetts is a wild ride of illegal searches, police stealing drugs and lives that are totally disrupted. AD Widely available, episodes weekly Writer and activist Nova Reid hosts this treasure trove of a podcast, profiling unsung Black women from history. Her subjects include pioneering journalist Barbara Blake-Hannah, civil rights campaigner Olive Morris and Queen Nanny of the Maroons – the freedom fighter whose story takes Reid deep into the origins of Jamaica's motto, 'Out of many, one people'. HJD Widely available, episodes weekly Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion 'We hated them, we hunted them, we battered them – it was a way of life.' For this scrutinising football podcast, Tony Bellew speaks to 'those who fought in the name of the 'firms' they believed in' as he delves into the fan hooliganism of the 1970s and 80s – and the darkest night in 1985, when 39 people were killed at the Heysel Stadium. Hollie Richardson BBC Sounds, all episodes out now
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
An Update on Our Family review – these influencers' murky tale makes you long to end the internet
Those of you who already feel that the world is too much would be best advised to stay well away from all three parts of the documentary An Update on Our Family. The family in question are the Stauffers – married couple Myka and James and their children – who were, until very recently, colossally successful family vloggers. Director Rachel Mason's series starts slowly, spending most of the first hour introducing the uninitiated to the world of YouTubers who specialise in filling their channels with videos of their gorgeous homes, gorgeous children and perfect lives, and to the fans who glom on to these affectless yet somehow intimate and generally wildly aspirational portraits of domestic bliss. 'I was literally a part of their life every day,' says former devotee Hannah Cho. She and around 700,000 subscribers to The Stauffer Life channel watched as Myka revealed positive pregnancy tests, had babies, a miscarriage, gave house cleaning tips, appraisals of her post-partum body and altogether so much desirable content that she began to accumulate sponsorship deals and the family's videos became the family's (very) lucrative business. Related: An Update on Our Family: the utterly shocking tale of the 'family vloggers' who 'rehomed' their adopted son This set-up could and should have been whipped through in half the time. The real meat of the documentary is what happens when you need to keep feeding the beast you have created. When your income depends on monetising your family, where does that lead? And can it possibly be anywhere good? Engagement with their channel goes through the roof when the Stauffers decide to adopt a three-year-old boy with special needs from China, whom they call Huxley. Myka has the name picked before she meets him, though no one around her seems to note that renaming a three-year-old child, and especially one with special needs, from a different culture, who is about to be yanked from it, is an extraordinary thing to do. But on they went, exhaustively documenting the process, including the first disastrous meeting with Huxley. Or 'Huxley'. It dawns on a tearful James that the boy 'had a full-blown mom' in his foster carer. 'Poor kid,' he whispers. The determinedly cheerful journey back to America is filmed and packaged for their waiting, avaricious online audience. The demand for updates thereafter is insatiable, and for a couple of years they keep coming, including ones about the behavioural issues caused by Huxley's autism and at least one from Myka noting that 'he grieved so hard' and that she was 'unprepared for what trauma truly looked like'. Then Huxley disappears from the family videos. Then previous videos containing him are deleted. Subscribers bombard the channel with questions. In 2020, the Stauffers posted a tearful video entitled An Update on Our Family explaining that though they love him with all their hearts, Huxley has had to be placed with a different 'forever family' better able to cope with his needs, the extent of which they had not fully understood at the time he was adopted. Their subscribers, and then – when the story went viral – the rest of the internet, took this news about as well as you would expect. A small amount of compassion was swamped by horror and disgust, by insults, anger, vitriol (directed mostly at Myka as a foul perversion of the maternal instinct), then death threats, then raging conspiracy theories that the Stauffers had sold him, killed him and God knows what else. Mason's film raises questions about just about every compelling issue of the internet age. It looks at the ethics of parents filming children who cannot give consent and who would in any professional, paid context be subject to myriad safeguarding regulations. It looks at the parasocial relationships that develop between content creators and followers, and the dangers of 'betraying' those attachments. It poses questions about the purity of creators' motives, and when a line is crossed between the natural human impulse to share, even show off, the good things in one's life and the need to curate an impossible perfection, especially once it becomes sponsored by rich brands. It looks at the optimism, arrogance and entitlement that can play a part in transnational adoptions. And it looks at those who jump on to an emotional bandwagon not because they were invested in the original story but because they are malevolent trolls dedicated to spitting into open wounds wherever they find them. The Stauffers refused to be involved with the film and their family channel has been offline since the backlash became uncontainable. So we will probably never know how many of their actions were driven by the greed for clicks, or whether it was simple benevolence throughout. But it is hard not to be reminded at every turn that the internet is the greatest unregulated experiment ever performed on humankind. And even harder not to conclude that, if it were possible, now might be a good time to end it. • An Update on Our Family aired on Sky Documentaries and is on Now.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
An Update on Our Family review – these influencers' murky tale makes you long to end the internet
Those of you who already feel that the world is too much would be best advised to stay well away from all three parts of the documentary An Update on Our Family. The family in question are the Stauffers – married couple Myka and James and their children – who were, until very recently, colossally successful family vloggers. Director Rachel Mason's series starts slowly, spending most of the first hour introducing the uninitiated to the world of YouTubers who specialise in filling their channels with videos of their gorgeous homes, gorgeous children and perfect lives, and to the fans who glom on to these affectless yet somehow intimate and generally wildly aspirational portraits of domestic bliss. 'I was literally a part of their life every day,' says former devotee Hannah Cho. She and around 700,000 subscribers to The Stauffer Life channel watched as Myka revealed positive pregnancy tests, had babies, a miscarriage, gave house cleaning tips, appraisals of her post-partum body and altogether so much desirable content that she began to accumulate sponsorship deals and the family's videos became the family's (very) lucrative business. This set-up could and should have been whipped through in half the time. The real meat of the documentary is what happens when you need to keep feeding the beast you have created. When your income depends on monetising your family, where does that lead? And can it possibly be anywhere good? Engagement with their channel goes through the roof when the Stauffers decide to adopt a three-year-old boy with special needs from China, whom they call Huxley. Myka has the name picked before she meets him, though no one around her seems to note that renaming a three-year-old child, and especially one with special needs, from a different culture, who is about to be yanked from it, is an extraordinary thing to do. But on they went, exhaustively documenting the process, including the first disastrous meeting with Huxley. Or 'Huxley'. It dawns on a tearful James that the boy 'had a full-blown mom' in his foster carer. 'Poor kid,' he whispers. The determinedly cheerful journey back to America is filmed and packaged for their waiting, avaricious online audience. The demand for updates thereafter is insatiable, and for a couple of years they keep coming, including ones about the behavioural issues caused by Huxley's autism and at least one from Myka noting that 'he grieved so hard' and that she was 'unprepared for what trauma truly looked like'. Then Huxley disappears from the family videos. Then previous videos containing him are deleted. Subscribers bombard the channel with questions. In 2020, the Stauffers posted a tearful video entitled An Update on Our Family explaining that though they love him with all their hearts, Huxley has had to be placed with a different 'forever family' better able to cope with his needs, the extent of which they had not fully understood at the time he was adopted. Their subscribers, and then – when the story went viral – the rest of the internet, took this news about as well as you would expect. A small amount of compassion was swamped by horror and disgust, by insults, anger, vitriol (directed mostly at Myka as a foul perversion of the maternal instinct), then death threats, then raging conspiracy theories that the Stauffers had sold him, killed him and God knows what else. Mason's film raises questions about just about every compelling issue of the internet age. It looks at the ethics of parents filming children who cannot give consent and who would in any professional, paid context be subject to myriad safeguarding regulations. It looks at the parasocial relationships that develop between content creators and followers, and the dangers of 'betraying' those attachments. It poses questions about the purity of creators' motives, and when a line is crossed between the natural human impulse to share, even show off, the good things in one's life and the need to curate an impossible perfection, especially once it becomes sponsored by rich brands. It looks at the optimism, arrogance and entitlement that can play a part in transnational adoptions. And it looks at those who jump on to an emotional bandwagon not because they were invested in the original story but because they are malevolent trolls dedicated to spitting into open wounds wherever they find them. The Stauffers refused to be involved with the film and their family channel has been offline since the backlash became uncontainable. So we will probably never know how many of their actions were driven by the greed for clicks, or whether it was simple benevolence throughout. But it is hard not to be reminded at every turn that the internet is the greatest unregulated experiment ever performed on humankind. And even harder not to conclude that, if it were possible, now might be a good time to end it. An Update on Our Family aired on Sky Documentaries and is on Now.
South China Morning Post
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Where is vlogger James Stauffer now, who controversially rehomed his son?
A new HBO docuseries has thrown controversial YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer back into the spotlight. Released on January 15, the three-part documentary series titled An Update on Our Family follows the story of how the vlogger parents adopted an autistic child from China only to reveal later that they had 'rehomed' him in 2020. They had adopted him when he was two and a half years old in 2017. Myka and James said that the toddler's needs had been greater than they had anticipated. 'For us, it's been really hard hearing from the medical professionals, a lot of their feedback, and things that have been upsetting,' James said in a May 2020 video. 'We've never wanted to be in this position. And we've been trying to get his needs met and help him out as much as possible ... we truly love him.' Myka Stauffer and James Stauffer were accused by netizens of adopting a child for the wrong reasons. Photo: @mykastauffer/Instagram The video drew plenty of backlash, with many netizens accusing the couple of adopting the child for financial or business related reasons, and for not taking on the responsibility required when adopting a child. While Myka has gone MIA on her public social media channels, James is still active on his platforms. Here's what we know about where he is now. What is James Stauffer's background? James Stauffer and Myka Stauffer no longer post on their socials about their family life. Photo: @mykastauffer/Instagram It appears James is still based in Columbus, Ohio, per his LinkedIn profile.
