'Like, Follow, Subscribe' looks at the rise of the child influencer industry

LAUREN GILGER: Mark, obviously you’ve heard of the Kardashians ?

MARK BRODIE: I’ve heard of them. I cannot say I keep up with them all that much though.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, but have you ever heard of the Loud family?

MARK BRODIE: I have not, no.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so I hadn’t either, but the Loud family— Pat and Bill Loud and their five kids — lived in Santa Barbara, California. And in 1972, they became the first reality TV family in a 12-hour series called "An American Family."

Here’s producer Craig Gilbert introducing the novel series before its first episode aired:

CRAIG GILBERT: For seven months, from May 30, 1971, to Jan. 1, 1972, the family was filmed as they went about their daily routine. There is no question that the presence of our camera crews and their equipment had an effect on the Louds, one which is impossible to evaluate. The Louds are neither average nor typical. No family is. They are not the American family; they are simply an American family.

LAUREN GILGER: It was that first reality TV family that spawned the Duggars, the Kardashians, the Gosselins and more according to our next guest. Because we all realized: We are fascinated by watching how other families live.

Fortesa Latifi is a journalist and author of the new book "Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online." In it, she looks at the rise of the child influencer industry whose parents are often the ones behind the camera and what’s it like to have your childhood moments sold to millions on Instagram as “content.”

Latifi went straight to the kids who were there in the book and dives into the lack of regulation around child influencers in the U.S.

Here in Arizona, House Bill 2192 would require family vloggers and content creators to set aside money for their kids the stars of the show, so to speak, who otherwise have no rights when it comes to the content they create.

I spoke with Latifi more about it all and just how big this industry has become.

FORTESA LATIFI: I mean, it’s huge. It’s part of the multi-billion-dollar influencing industry and, I mean, there are thousands of families who I would think of as kind of the top strata, and there are thousands more who are trying to get up there.

LAUREN GILGER: So give us an example of what this looks like. If someone’s not on Instagram or on social media and doesn’t know what this looks like, it almost seems innocuous at first. It’ll start out with, you know, a birth announcement, or sometimes even before a birth announcement, right?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, it’s really interesting. A good amount of influencer kids start their social media presence when they’re in utero. So their parents will start posting for them from the womb and they’ll rack up hundreds of thousands of followers that way. And then, you know, when the child is born, the opportunity for content just explodes and the algorithm really loves babies, and it really loves pregnant moms.

LAUREN GILGER: So they — I don’t want to say like people innocently stumbled upon this — but it seems as if it’s developed from almost an accidental place, where people just sort of realized, you know, I could start selling this thing that my kid’s wearing or getting this for free and then that kind of evolved?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, I think it depends on the person, but oftentimes they’ll have just posted something and it’ll have gone accidentally viral because the internet just, you know, the algorithm, we don’t know its ways and sometimes it’ll push things.

And then people will say, OK, let me take a crack at this because they see the immense possibility for financial freedom.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, financial freedom is a good way to put it, because you talk to some of these mom influencers about the financial realities that they face and, like, they can make a really, really significant amount of money by doing this. And there may be questionable things about that that we can talk about in a second, but just, I mean, first of all, how do they make this kind of money?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, so you make the money in a few different ways. One is sponsored posts, so that’s where a brand pays for you to post something that is essentially a commercial.

And then they’re paid by YouTube and TikTok for views once you have a certain number of followers and subscribers, so you get paid directly by the platform.

You also get paid through affiliate links, which is like when someone messages a mom influencer and says, oh, where did you get that cup that you got for your daughter, and she posts the link and then you click it and you buy the cup, she makes money off of you clicking that link.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and often you’ll see these posts, family pictures, doing whatever they may be doing, but everything in the post is linked out; you can buy it.

FORTESA LATIFI: Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, everything is a commercial.

LAUREN GILGER: And they’re making how much money on this?

FORTESA LATIFI: Well, the top strata of mom influencers or family vloggers can make millions of dollars a year.

LAUREN GILGER: Millions, that’s wild. So we talked about babies and the algorithm kind of loving babies and pregnant moms, right? But this goes beyond that. Like, you’ve got mom influencers who document their kids’ first periods or kisses or like all the way through, you know, their growing up.

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think people love to see intimate moments in a child’s life and I think that’s why we see these really intimate moments. I mean, I’ve seen kids shaving their legs for the first time, getting the sex talk, I’ve seen kids saying goodbye to their late grandmother’s casket. I mean, people really want to see those intimate moments, and family vloggers are serving those up.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so one of the really groundbreaking things that you do in this book is talk to the kids, the kids who were the subject of these things. What did they have to tell you? Like, what was it like to grow up on screen like that when, you know, your parents are the ones documenting it?

FORTESA LATIFI: You know, there really are a variety of experiences. Some kids that I talked to said, you know, this is great, I’m homeschooled so we can make more content, I already have my own YouTube channel with 600,000 subscribers and when I grow up I’m going to do family content.

And then other kids said, if it were up to me, none of this content would ever exist and I don’t feel like I had any privacy. And I think that nuance of knowing that those two things can be true at once is really important because when people try to flatten the narrative to say every child influencer is miserable, that’s just not true.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, and there has been a significant amount of backlash that you talk about as well, about people sort of saying, especially in recent years, like, this is not moral, you should not benefit financially from your kids in this way. What is the argument there?

FORTESA LATIFI: I think people feel that children cannot give informed consent about being online, especially when they’re really young, that even if you’re asking like a young child, like, is this OK for me to put on the internet, they just can’t understand it. And that they deserve privacy and they deserve a brief online footprint.

LAUREN GILGER: Let’s talk about the regulation aspect of this that you get at in the book. Like, you write that for a lot of these families it becomes more like a business arrangement than a family, right? Like, your parents are your boss in a way that that’s not really, you know, normal. And you point out that there’s no, like, child advocate on set for a family vlog, like there’s no way that anyone’s regulating this like there would be for child actors or models, right?

FORTESA LATIFI: No, I mean, the nature of child influencing is that it takes place alongside life and it takes place in the home, right? And so you can’t really send people into other people’s homes and say, tell us how much the child is working. And it’s also like it’s difficult to kind of parse what is work and what is not when a child is just living their lives and being recorded, you know? Like, the inherent nature of child influencing makes it really difficult to legislate.

LAUREN GILGER: I think the big difference here, right, like between a child actor and a kid whose parents are influencers in this way is that it’s their parents doing it, right? Like, I think it has to be assumed that they love their children and that’s supposed to be the protection, right?

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, I mean, I think especially in the U.S. where we so prize parental rights, it’s really difficult to say, oh, I know better than this parent who is making the choice for their kid.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So what did the parents have to say when you asked them some of these tough questions? Because you interviewed many of them as well.

FORTESA LATIFI: Yeah, I mean, some of them are grappling with these issues. They are wondering, kind of, am I taking it too far, does my child not have any privacy? But I think they’re just coming down on a different decision than maybe some of us would, but they’re also quite defensive of their work. They feel that, you know, that their kids love it, that they’re benefiting, that anything that is negative is outweighed by the positives.

LAUREN GILGER: What about some of that negative though, Fortesa, because this gets into, you know, child predator territory sometimes online?

FORTESA LATIFI: It does. I mean, we know there was that groundbreaking New York Times investigation about how predators in these chat rooms were talking about, you know, thank God for mom and kid influencers because there’s just all this content that we get to take in.

And the parents that I talked to, they were worried about the possibility of predators, and for some of them it wasn’t even the possibility; they had had confirmation that predators were watching their content because they’d gotten comments and messages, but it wasn’t enough to change how they show up online.

And I think they were like, we can’t live at the fear of these predators and just give up everything that we love doing, which I can understand kind of, but I think it’s really difficult as a mom myself to hear about the messages they were getting and just kind of moving on from that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, Fortesa Latifi, a journalist and author of the new book, “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.” Fortesa, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

FORTESA LATIFI: Thank you for having me.