For a long while now on YouTube there has been a problem with “kid influencers” being exploited by their parents for money, and many don’t have a voice or a choice. Bad Influence: The dark side of Kidfluencing documentary examines the many issues with this part of YouTube and uses the case study of Piper Rockwell and the Squad.
This is very much a story that has everyone talking in the YouTube space and is very current. It is interesting that Netflix have finally made a docuseries highlighting awareness of this worryingly subject matter.
The three-part series focuses on the rise of child to teen social media star Piper Rockelle and her mother Tiffany Smith, who is also her manager. It all started when Piper was three years old, and her mother put her in a toddler and child pageantry where she won a lot of awards. Tiffany then put Piper on social media, where she gained lots of followers and views. To increase her daughters appeal she gradually added other children who were friends/performers to Rockelle’s videos and then they became known as the “The Squad”. This kept on growing their audience.
Smith’s younger boyfriend Hunter Hill was portrayed to be Piper’s older brother online.
He would film her videos and codirect with Tiffany. Weird right!! It gets worse as they made Piper and other people in the squad do uncomfortable stuff, such as dancing like strippers, kiss/make out and to doing provocative challenges. They were only 12/13/14 years old.
Some of the former squad felt that Hunter was a little bit weird, and they felt uncomfortable.
At one point Tiffany told them to be mean towards each other in videos and was cutthroat towards them, all the while rewarding them for doing crazy things. To make matters worse, she would flirt with this younger boy called Gavin who was also in the squad and was only 12 or 13. Smith also made out with Sawyer, another boy in the squad on his livestream which was inappropriate as he was 13 years old.
Tiffany must have known that what she did was wrong as the footage was taken off the internet.
At her peak Piper was making half a million dollars a month from her content, which was handled by, you guessed it, her mother Tiffany.
There are interviews with former kids in the squad about their experiences and none of them look old enough to be even out of their teens now. They explained how Squad family members became concerned about the 16 hours filming, not getting the proper treatment that kids should get and how they didn’t get their share of the money being made. They built a picture that Tiffany was a woman using the power of manipulation and her business savvy which led her to buy and create a content house for the kids to live in, and for her to be able to control them. There was a massive blur between professional and private ethics because the domestic arrangements led to the abuse of the children.
The problem is that now there are no labour laws to protect the children, for example when allowing children to express themselves on camera for fun which could turn into monetisation. Given what we know now, it’s all a bit seedy especially given how the audience could be potential predators.
There are shocking allegations about Tiffany’s sexual behaviour towards these children, which if true is clearly wrong in every way.
Even Tiffany’s niece Claire stated, “sometimes you didn’t understand how she was getting away with doing these things”.
In 2022, 11 former members of the squad filed a lawsuit alleging that the adults in charge were violating child labour laws, using inappropriate and abusive treatment towards them.
One former squad member Corinne said that she remembered at aged 12 going to the post office with Tiffany who was sending what appeared to be a package of Rockelle’s underwear.
Corinne asked why, and she told her “Old men like to smell it”.
In 2024 they got a settlement, it was 1.85 million to split amongst the 11 children and their families.
Some of the parents said that Smith created a cult-like atmosphere. They were forbidden to attend their children’s filming sessions and were reluctant to say anything or leave the group because of threats about the consequences. They saw what happened to one kid that left the group. Piper unfollowed them and the views on their own YouTube Channel went down drastically. Some say that there should have been more parental responsibility, which is slightly glossed over by the filmmakers, but it doesn’t lessen Tiffany’s crimes.
This it is a documentary that you need to watch. Serious stuff but worth delving into to learn more about the relationship between kids, money and the internet.