July 14, 2025

Kidfluencing, a bellwether

In the fifth episode of Born to Be Viral: The Real Lives of Kidfluencers, two fathers of child social media stars meet up. The show, airing on Freeform and available in its entirety on Hulu, follows influencer families, interviewing them at various intervals over a period of about five years. When the two dads meet, they ritualistically state to one another that they didn’t plan on exploiting their children for millions of dollars. It just… happened.

Justin McClure: My wife and I didn’t want to be YouTubers.
Kyler Fisher: I didn’t want to be a YouTuber. Are you kidding me? I wanted to be successful in business.

This a theme with both sets of successful kidfluencer parents. They state, over and over again, the financial gains to be made from farming their children’s lives out to be monetized. They insist they are doing their children a favor by making them work 24/7, without access to public education. Their children, these parents say, can use the platform built for them as children to continue to make money into adulthood. They have carved a place for their children in the attention economy and are building “generational wealth” using what purports to be passive income.

(Of course, the income is anything but passive. These children are forced to give up their lives, forced to playact every emotion and moment. Their entire relationship with their parents is mediated through a camera, for an unseen audience of millions, many of whom are predators.)

But pretending this was all an accident—rather than the hard work of tracking trends, editing videos, and making sure your thumbnail captures the Google algorithm—is an important part of the process for these parents. They need to obfuscate, for themselves and others, the intentional harm they are doing to their families, to their children, and to the world.

Born to be Viral is one of many recent televised forays into excavating the effect of “kidfluencing.” There was An Update on Our Family for HBO Max, a series about one family who adopted and then “rehomed” a high-needs disabled child, seemingly in a bid for online viewership. Earlier this year, Netflix put out Bad Influence, about one group of parents and their abused influencer children. And, of course, there have been countless documentaries about Ruby Franke, the Mormon “tough love” momfluencer who stopped streaming due to pushback from viewers about her on-camera treatment of her children. She took them offline, abused them privately, and was arrested in 2023 when one of her children escaped and went to a neighbor for help.

These documentaries arrive at a strange time for the United States, politically.

Family influencers are the embodiment of the Christian nationalist project in many ways. These families homeschool, a core tenet of Christian nationalism. The children work (another thing the GOP has been pushing). The families typify the idea of what an American family should look like according to the rightwing: heterosexual parents and camera-ready kids. The moms are often pregnant (a surefire way to garner views) and all play at being stay-at-home mothers. The dads seek out ways to further monetize the family via brands. The children are not people, with rights of their own, but property of their parents. A strict hierarchy is maintained, with parents at the top.

Not to mention, online, capitalism is the entertainment. This is true for family vloggers and anyone else in the internet space. To wit: a video from YouTuber Mr. Beast announcing a new version of his chocolate bar has fifty five million views. His video about making chocolate bar ads for various dollar amounts has sixty million views. Mr. Beast’s ability to hawk chocolate products to his largely child-age audience is part of the show.

And our current president rolls all of these things into one.

Trump pioneered capitalism as entertainment. The Apprentice, the brainchild of British reality show producer Mark Burnett, was Trump’s major launching pad. In the show, contestants showed off their “business knowledge” in order to win a “job” with Trump. Here, Trump expanded on the false idea of himself as a smart businessman. On The Apprentice, business was showcased as a skill one can have. Of course, in real life, business acumen is often timing, luck, and an ability to get a small bridge loan of $100,000 from your parents.

Trump, like Reagan before him, took his skill in one form of mass media (TV) to conquer the newest form (the internet). He brought together once-disparate groups of online misogynists and racists to launch himself to power twice.

Although they appear different on the surface, family influencers and the online contingent who make up Trump’s base have a lot in common. They both value hierarchies. The manosphere “grindset” is simply the family influencer’s many brand partnerships in a different font. Family influencers may be involved in multi-level marketing schemes, while manosphere influencers sell courses on how to be “alphas.” Strict gender roles are maintained throughout. However you slice it, they’re all selling the ideas of white hegemonic capitalism back to you. (The internet is agnostic to nation states, so the American tone of all of his can vary.)

In her 1987 book The Looking Glass World of Nonfiction TV, media critic Elayne Rapping writes of Reagan: “The fact that [the president who was able to harness TV to shore up his power] was a Hollywood movie star, who learned to be a hero and leader from Samuel Goldwyn, is almost predictable. Had we seen it in a movie we would have called it simplistic, melodramatic, silly—adjectives that apply to Reagan himself. They are also major features of show business and sports, of beauty pageants and even space flights. Considering the grip these rituals have on the American consciousness, it was inevitable that our most popular and media proficient president should be a movie star.”

Similarly, it makes sense that Trump, the avatar of the internet age, is a TV pitchman. The internet, which as replaced TV as the major form of mass media, is billed as a freewheeling and free flowing information exchange. Of course, it is anything but. Only certain types of thought, speech, and expression are allowed, just as was true for TV. Hegemonic thought dominates in an internet which has been shrinking since its inception. There is nothing conglomerates can’t buy¹.

At it core, the internet is simply a vehicle for sales. (Steve Coogan’s character Alan Partridge, on his podcast From the Oasthouse, says catalogs were the precursor to the internet.) Instagram is for selling. TikTok is for selling. YouTube is for selling. If you participate online, rather than just view, you are selling something, whether you intended to or not. Network TV may have been shoring up American hegemonic power, but the internet—with its globalized reach—cuts to the chase and shores up capitalism alone. This is especially true now, since tech billionaires want to rid themselves of the limited regulation of nation states to create their own capitalist fiefdoms.

Given the ascendancy of the rightwing, it is a strange time for family influencing pushback to surface. Questioning the ethics of family influencing is questioning, ultimately, the ethics of the white capitalist project. It has yet to be seen if this project is at the height of its power or breaking in front of our eyes. But if Andrew Breitbart, rightwing gadfly and namesake for a white nationalist website, was right and “politics is downstream from culture,” these recent documentaries about family influencing may give us an idea of where the wind is blowing.