Latest news with #Franke
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Kids, Inc.
The scenes leave a pit in your stomach. In Netflix's 'Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing,' two early teenagers are pressured to kiss by adults — a parent and a videographer — on camera. Hulu's 'The Devil in the Family: The Ruby Franke Story' shows the dramatic footage of Franke's 12-year-old son showing up at a neighbor's door with duct tape markings around his ankle, asking them to call police. The pair of documentaries, released this year, shine a light on the perils of child-centered online content. 'Bad Influence' examines claims of abuse and exploitation made by 11 former members of the teen YouTube collective 'The Squad' against Tiffany Smith — who ran the YouTube channel, which drew two million subscribers — and her former boyfriend Hunter Hill. Both denied the allegations, and the suit was settled for a reported $1.85 million last year. Ruby Franke, a mother of six, pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse in 2023 after denying her children adequate food and water and isolating them as she built a family YouTube channel that amassed nearly 2.5 million subscribers before it was taken down. She will serve up to 30 years in prison. Concerns about the treatment of child entertainers have abounded since the days of Judy Garland and through last year's 'Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,' in which former Nickelodeon actors described performing under harmful and sexually inappropriate conditions. Less examined is the working world of child influencers, who are now speaking out about the harsh, unsafe or emotionally taxing constraints of being broadcast by their parents. Viewers may be tempted to ask, 'Aren't there laws against this?' 'We have pretty documented evidence of the troubling pipeline for Hollywood and child actors, but we don't have nearly similar numbers for child influencers, primarily because the phenomenon of influencing is so young,' said Chris McCarty, the founder and executive director of Quit Clicking Kids, an organization dedicated to stopping the monetization of minors. 'A lot of the kids are too young to even really fully understand what's going on, let alone, like, actually speak out about their experiences.' Child entertainer laws — which in some cases make provisions for minors' education, set limits on working hours and stipulate that earnings be placed in a trust — regulate theatrical industries. The world of content creators, where an account with a sizable following can generate millions of dollars a year for creators, is largely unregulated. McCarty worked with the California legislature to draft an amendment to the Coogan Law, legislation passed in 1939 that requires employers to set aside 15 percent of a child actor's earnings in a trust. In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed Senate Bill 764, mandating that creators who feature children in 30 percent or more of their content set aside a proportioned percentage of their earnings into a trust for the child to access when they turn 18. The law went into effect this year and made California the third state (along with Illinois and Minnesota) to adopt financial protections for children featured in social media content. Some notable family vloggers uprooted from California for Tennessee in the immediate aftermath. The LaBrant family, whose YouTube (12.8 million subscribers) and TikTok content (the mother, Savannah, has 30.3 million followers) mainly revolves around their five young children, explained their move to Nashville in a post, saying 'We truly feel like this is where God is calling our family.' Brittany Xavier, a prominent TikTok creator with over 3 million followers whose content mostly showcases her three children, attributed her move to Nashville to finding mold in her family's California rental house. They did not respond to requests for comment, nor did they cite the new law as the reason for their departures, but commenters on their videos and on Reddit have speculated about whether the new legislation contributed to their moves. The amendment to the Coogan Law could be a starting point to more regulation. 'The law can also be expanded to make sure that kids have boundaries on their working hours and protections in terms of being guaranteed education,' said Mary Jean Amon, an assistant professor at Indiana University who specializes in research on parental sharing and beliefs about autonomy and consent. That might prove difficult given the lack of boundaries between work and home for child influencers. In 'The Devil in the Family,' the Franke children protested rarely having any time off from making content — outtakes from their vlogs showed one of the family's sons, Chad, who is now 20, being told to answer with more enthusiasm when he was tired and didn't want to be on camera. 'It felt more like a set than a house,' Shari Franke, 22, says in one scene in the documentary. 'For kid influencers, those cameras are ubiquitous since most of the adults around them will have one in hand at virtually all times,' Amon said. 'Rather than playing characters, child influencers are observed as themselves, while also being heavily rewarded for pandering to the desires of strangers, and sometimes they're punished for failing to do so.' Those follower-strangers represent a danger far more difficult to address. Deja Smith, a stay-at-home mother from the Houston area, creates lifestyle videos for Instagram and TikTok, where she has a following of about 140,000. She shared details and images of her newborn daughter for most of the first year of her life until strangers started recognizing her child in public and leaving upsetting comments on social media. After reading more about the ways users can manipulate children's images through artificial intelligence and search for personal information like an address through photos, she wiped images of her daughter from the internet altogether. 'I honestly feel uncomfortable watching other family vloggers' accounts that are centered around their kid,' Smith said. 'I'm not interested, and I block because I don't want to be a part of that or supporting that kind of content.'
CBC
09-04-2025
- Climate
- CBC
How well did London clear snow this winter? 2 councillors want a review
Icy sidewalks, unplowed roads and difficulty getting to school are just some of the complaints piling up from London residents who faced challenges getting around in the ice and snow this past winter. Now, two councillors are calling for a review of the city's snow and ice removal — and what needs to improve. London's Ward 7 councillor Corrine Rahman and Ward 11 councillor Skylar Franke are putting forward a motion to the infrastructure and corporate services committee with a vote at Wednesday's meeting. "I think our staff do a great job. I think that the contractors that help us out do a great job, but there's always room for improvement," Rahman said. The review would look at how the city used contracted services during the 2024-2025 winter season, alternative options for snow and ice removal on roads and sidewalks, clearance around schools, and suggestions for new machinery to help with windrows, which form when snow is left at the end of a driveway after a plow has cleared the road. "In Old South and Wortley Village where there's a lot of people who walk around to get to work, to the bus and to school, I was hearing a lot of complaints about icy sidewalks," said Franke, adding that while most complaints were from pedestrians, she also heard from drivers about a need for faster snow clearance on the road. She also heard from families near Woodland Heights Public School on Springbank Drive who had challenges walking, she said. "The main entrance is off Springbank, but most people come from the neighbourhood behind the school and those pathways are not maintained in the winter." Meanwhile, Rahman said windrows are a key issue among many residents in her ward. "A lot of people sent me a video that was being shared on social media about how to get the snow not to build up at the end of your driveways when the plows go by," she said, adding that a review could highlight suggestions that other communities have already adopted to fix maintenance issues. The review is also a way for residents to learn how much money is needed for potential changes, Rahman said. "It's always good to know the cost of those kinds of services so people can really think about it from the perspective of council and what kinds of considerations we have to make for service improvements," she said. City teams clear close to 4,000 kms of roadway and more than 1,700 kms of sidewalk in the winter, said Joel Gillard, the city's division manager of road operations, in an email. He said they prioritize high traffic routes before clearing local streets and cul de sacs. "This winter has been very busy for our crews responding to all of the snow, and we recognize the winter weather has continued later in the season than what Londoners have previously experienced the past few years," Gillard said. Franke said the goal is to get committee approval Wednesday so the conversation can go to council sometime this spring. "We're hoping to get this done so that next winter, we can really address people's concerns and try to make the city easier to walk around in the winter," she said.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Yahoo
Utah's new child influencer law cracks the veneer of social media fame
In a February Hulu documentary featuring Shari Franke, eldest child of the infamous mommy blogger Ruby Franke, Shari's brother Chad and her father, Kevin, viewers are privy to behind-the-scenes video from the now-defunct family vlog. In one clip, Ruby smiles while recording herself before breaking off to scream at her family off-screen. The documentary, titled 'Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke,' features several moments like this, moments that illustrate what detractors see as a wider phenomenon in which the family blogging industry is exposed for its many pitfalls and deceptions, particularly as it pertains to the protection and treatment of children. Indeed, Utah, where the Franke family resided and recorded daily family life for years, has become the fourth state to legislate protections for influencer kids with the passing of HB 322 into law in March, following high-profile activism from Franke family members, who were YouTube family vlogging royalty before matriarch Ruby was arrested on charges of child abuse. Ruby Franke and her estranged husband, Kevin Franke, were the head of the YouTube family channel '8 Passengers.' At its height, the channel commanded more than 2 million subscribers. In her content, Ruby Franke often touted strict parenting, like the time she infamously refused to bring her 6-year-old daughter lunch after the child had forgotten it or when her teenage son was made to sleep on a beanbag for months as a punishment. In 2023, Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested on charges of child abuse after Franke's 12-year-old son escaped from Hildebrandt's house. The child appeared emaciated and had wounds on his wrists and ankles. Franke's 9-year-old daughter was found in a closet of Hildebrandt's house, in a similar state. Hildebrandt and Franke each pleaded guilty to four counts of felony child abuse, for which they were sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. The fallout of Ruby Franke's arrest was intense. For detractors of family vloggers and mom influencers, Franke's arrest was proof positive that their suspicions were correct and something ominous was lurking under the perfect veneer of social media fame. Anti-vlogging advocates had the feeling that the bottom was finally falling out of a deeply rotten industry. Buffeted by the moment, Shari Franke, the eldest child of Ruby Franke, spoke in front of the Utah Legislature, saying, 'There is no ethical or moral family vlogger.' In the wake of the Franke family tragedy, calls for protections for kids of influencers have intensified. Though people often assume that child influencers are covered under legal protections for child actors, they're not. In 46 of 50 states, it's legal for parents to feature their kids in monetized or sponsored content without paying the children for their labor. It's particularly impactful for Utah, of all states, to have passed legislation for the privacy and profits of influencer kids, as experts often point to Utah as a hot spot for mom influencers, family vloggers and kid influencers. There's an entire book to be written about why Mormon people are so drawn to influencing — and why they're often so successful at it, including the fact that recordkeeping and scrapbooking are mainstay traditions of the Mormon faith, skills that lend themselves to content creation — but the bottom line is that Utah is one of the most popular states for family vloggers and mom influencers. And though people who were raised as kid influencers aren't a monolith, it's important to listen to them when they speak about their experiences, like when Shari Franke told Rolling Stone, 'Making money off your kids [with] no oversight as to how much the kids are getting paid — there's no way to do that well for me.' I'm a journalist who covers family vloggers and mom influencers, and my take on their work is far from black-and-white. I don't believe that showing your kid online is immoral in itself. We shouldn't conflate the horrors of Ruby Franke's story with the lives of every kid featured in their influencer parents' content. And not every mom influencer and family vlogger are evil — far from it. But if there's an industry that turns on the labor of kids, it makes sense to compensate them for their labor, at the very least. This article was originally published on
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.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Yahoo
‘I did not know my rights': Jodi Hildebrandt challenges conviction in high-profile child abuse case
ST. GEORGE, Utah (ABC4) — Jodi Hildebrandt, a therapist who worked with YouTube vlogger Ruby Franke, is challenging her conviction, saying she didn't know her rights when she pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse in late 2023. Hildebrandt and Franke were both sentenced to up to 30 years in prison on child abuse charges after accepting plea deals. At the time, Hildebrandt's lawyers said she was not the person she was being portrayed as but was accepting the consequences for her conduct. She had said one of the reasons she didn't want to go to trial was so the children didn't have 'to emotionally relive the experience.' PREVIOUSLY: Imprisoned Franke, Hildebrandt sued for alleged 'racketeering' abuse scheme Now, Hildebrandt is calling her plea agreement 'unlawful,' with documents saying it was 'unlawfully induced or not made knowingly and voluntarily with understanding of the nature of the charge and the consequences of the plea.' Hildebrandt filed a petition for relief on her own behalf last Monday, March 24, writing, 'I did not know my rights and my attorney did not inform me of them.' The petition listed several other claims, including that her counsel was 'ineffective' and the prosecution failed to give adequate notice of the charges. Attorney Eric Clarke that they 'weren't expecting this from Jodi, but I can't say that we're super surprised either.' 'I'm super confident that the entry of her plea will hold up, and that she won't be able to show that she knowingly, involuntarily didn't enter it,' Clarke told ABC. 'She's mentally ill': Ruby Franke's prison phone calls reveal evolving stance on Jodi Hildebrandt Hildebrandt and Franke were prosecuted after one of YouTuber Franke's children and asked a neighbor for food and water. State prosecutors would later claim that the offenders put Franke's children in a 'concentration camp-like setting,' regularly denied them food and water, and subjected them to 'physical torture.' The case — which already had a following due to the Franke family's former YouTube Channel '' — has since garnered greater national attention with the recent release of the Hulu docuseries 'Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke.' Franke and Hildebrandt will have their first parole hearing in December 2026, approximately three years after they pleaded guilty to the charges. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
