Child Influencer Exploitation: Ruby Franke's 8 Passengers and the Family Vlogging Industry

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1:05Sure, you can post your job to some job board. But then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. At zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. This powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of, hey, Zippercrooter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire. And right now, you can try Zippercrooter for free. That's right. For free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. That zippercrooter.com slash zip zippercrooter.com slash zip. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board.

2:07But then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. At zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. Zippercrooter finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, Zippercrooter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire. And right now, you can try Zippercrooter for free. It's right. Free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. That zippercrooter.com slash zip zippercrooter.com slash zip. Warning, the following Zippercrooter radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercrooter know you can feel frustrated for Lauren even.

3:08Like your efforts are futile and you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. F***. Unfortunately, Zippercrooter figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercrooter for free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. With Zippercrooter, you can forget your frustrations. Because we find the right people for your roles fast. Which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. F***. Fantastic. So, whether you need to hire four, 40, or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercrooter.com slash zip to try Zippercrooter for free. Don't forget that zippercrooter.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercrooter.com slash zip. This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brusky. Here now, Tony Brusky. In 2015, a video called Baby Climes out of crib when viral on YouTube.

4:10It showed the youngest, Frankie Child, a toddler, maybe two years old, climbing over the rails of a lime green crib. The video was cute. It was relatable. It was exactly the kind of content the algorithm loves. A funny moment from family life, authentic and shareable. The woman helped behind it, that video, Ruby Frankie, that helped launch eight passengers into the stratosphere soon after it went viral. Ruby Frankie incorporated eight passengers, productions, LLC. Family business was born. That same toddler, nine years later, it would be found malnourished and terrified in an empty closet in Jodie Hildebrand's house. This is part three of the good mother. Part one was about the emotional performance. The parent whose love is a show for others this episode is about something different. The structure underneath it, the business model, what happens when children aren't just extensions of their parents' ego, but literal products.

5:12Here's what the family vlogging industry doesn't want you to think about too hard. The product is the children. Not the parenting advice, not the lifestyle tips, not the wholesome family brand. The content that gets views, the content that drives engagement and ad revenue and sponsorship deals is footage of kids, their milestones or struggles, their embarrassments, their worst moments, things that used to be private that you held on to because they were special because they were moments that defined you good and bad. But when mom or dad wants to share that with the world for profit, it kind of starts to feel a little different now, doesn't it? We're going to go through this, and as we do, your thoughts in the comments section on Substack and YouTube, the links are in the description.

6:14Love for you to weigh in, and we will continue the conversation there. The algorithm rewards authenticity, which means the algorithm rewards access. The more intimate the footage, the more engagement it generates, the more conflict, the more comments, the more drama, the more shares, Ruby Frankie understood this. She filmed five days a week, posting at 6am and by 2020, the channel had two and a half million subscribers at a billion views. It's not a hobby, it's an industry. And the children were the raw material. Jerry Frankie, the eldest testified before the Utah State Senate in October 24 about what this meant in practice. The children were paid $10 per video they helped with. Sometimes a family vacation was offered as compensation, except the vacation itself was funded by content featuring the children. They were working to earn trips that were actually more work. The labor was circular. The home felt more like a set than a house, Jerry said.

7:15Privacy didn't exist, doors were removed from bedrooms, moments that should have been private, puberty conversations, emotional breakdowns, punishments were recorded and uploaded. The boundary between family life and content production dissolved entirely. And here's a part that should disturb anyone who watches family vloggers. A child cannot consent to this. They don't understand what it means to have their worst moments preserved forever online. They don't understand that the internet doesn't forget that college admissions officers and future employers and potential partners will be able to search their names and find footage of them being punished at age 10. They just know that when they do what their parent wants, they're rewarded. And when they don't, there's consequences. Jerry's testimony to the Utah Senate wasn't about her mother's conviction. It was about something she sees as separate and in some ways equally damaging. To be clear, Jerry told the legislators, this is never ever a good reason or there is

8:20never ever a good reason for posting your children online for money or fame. She paused. There is no such thing as a moral or ethical family blocker. And then she said something that should be heard by everyone who grew up being used by a parent. Family vlogging ruined my innocence long before Ruby committed a crime. And that line matters because Jerry is making a distinction. The torture, the starvation, the bindings, the wounds treated with cayenne pepper that came later to her brother and sister. Jodie entered the picture that was criminal. That's why Ruby is in prison, but before all of that, there was something else. A childhood spent on camera. A childhood where every moment was potentially content. A childhood where Jerry's value was measured by what she provided, not who she was. That wasn't illegal. It was just profitable.

9:21And Jerry is saying it was still harmful. It's still cost her something. It's still shaped who she is and what she has to recover from. There's a documentary that aired in 25 called Devil in the Sky. Devil in the family, rather. It featured Kevin Frankie and two of his adult children, Sherry and Chad. It included hours of raw footage to make passengers, the outtakes, the moments between moments. The parts that didn't make the final cuts. Kevin Frankie watched that footage and said something that should disturb anyone in the family vlogging space. It's going to be a lot of people who see the raw footage and say, that was horrible. And it's so disturbing the way they're talking to their children. And that looks exploitative. I'm telling you, there will not be a single family content creator and social media that watches that and is not cringe because that is representative of every single one of them. Let's say that lightly.

10:23Every single one of them. It's a big claim. Kevin Frankie isn't positioning himself as an outside observer. He was there. He participated. He's seen how the business works and he's saying the Frankie's weren't our outliers. They were just the ones who got caught. The economics of family vlogging create perverse incentives. Content that performs well gets rewarded with views, subscribers, ad revenue, content that performs well is often content that shows conflict, emotion, drama, and vulnerability, which means the more a family is willing to expose their children's difficult moments, the more successful their channel becomes. A child's tantrum is engagement. A child's punishment is content. A child's embarrassment is shareable. And the parent holding the camera has a financial incentive to keep filming, keep uploading, keep extracting value for moments that should be private.

11:30This isn't necessarily unique to the Frankie's. It's the business model. And as long as platforms reward this kind of content, parents will keep producing it. Since Ruby's arrest, Utah has been considering legislation to protect the children of content creators. The bill would require parents who earn $150,000 more annually from content featuring their minor children to set aside 15% of the earnings in a trust the child can access at 18. It would also give children the right to have content featuring them removed from the internet when they reach adulthood. The laws have passed in California and Illinois, but Utah, the state Sherry identified as a hotbed of family content creation partly because the LDS church encourages large families in sharing faith publicly has been slower to act. Sherry continues to advocate for change. Inter testimony she acknowledged that she wasn't asking legislators to ban family vlogging

12:34out right not yet. She was asked them to recognize it as a problem to understand that children are being used to start the conversation about what protections might be necessary. I understand as Utahans, we don't appreciate big government overreach, she said. But when it comes to protecting children, it should be a bipartisan issue. The only people harmed by child influencer laws are the parents exploiting their children. The four minor Frankie children are now in state custody and documentary footage their faces are blurred, their names redacted, and for the first time of their lives, they're not content. That protection came after years of being monetized. After a child hood spent on camera, after wounds that will take decades to heal. The algorithm that made Ruby Frankie famous didn't care about those children and just

13:37wanted engagement and Ruby was happy to provide it until the day your son climbed out a window and the performance finally ended. Not every parent with a camera is Ruby Frankie, not every family vlogger is abusing their children. But every family vlogger is making a choice to monetize their children's lives to turn private moments into public content to trade their children's privacy for revenue. And the children don't get to choose, they don't understand the trade they're making. They just know the camera is always there. And their job is to perform. Sherry Frankie understands this better than most, she lived it, she's still recovering from it, and she's cleared eyed about what it cost her. Family vlogging ruined my innocence long before Ruby committed a crime. It's not a statement about one bad mother, that's a statement about an industry.

14:45What are your thoughts? Is family vlogging always bad? Is there a way to do it ethically when one of the parties or more has no choice in the matter, has no ability to fully understand the repercussions for what exactly they're doing in participating in? Whether the laws going far enough in California, the 15% rule, and how's it being enforced? How is that being monitored? And if a parent doesn't do it, what are the repercussions? Is there Annie? Sure, the kid could go back and sue you once they turn 18. If you got the money, but then if you have a good relationship with your parent too, I mean, are you?

15:45It's one of those things we're on paper, okay, this looks like something. Or is this something where the content platforms themselves need to step up and go, you know what, we're not doing this anymore. Or is it a case by case basis? What's the line? What's the bar? What's too much? Your reviewers of Ruby Frankie, who loved watching it, who loved her style of parenting, her disciplinary in way of handling things, and thought, yeah, that's how it should be done. And there's many out there to this day that still have that way of thinking, just because she's deplatformed doesn't mean her idea or way of thinking is. And it doesn't mean it didn't exist before it was put out there onto YouTube so that

16:48people could feel not so alone in their shitty ways of parenting. If there's a community for it, people will find it. And that's the world we live in right now, whether it's on YouTube or whatever platform there is. There's community for bad behavior and those communities normalize the bad behavior. You can keep whack emolling the communities. The bad behavior is always going to exist. It's a fundamental shift that needs to change inside of people if we're ever going to truly stop this. But until then, I guess it's whack emoll. Your thoughts in the comments section on YouTube or our sub stack. The links are in the description. There's two more parts to this series. I hope you'll join us for them. Be sure to press subscribe so you don't miss them. Until then, we'll continue our conversation in the comments. I'm Tony Bursky. We'll talk again real soon. Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now. And don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Bursky and the Hidden Killers Podcast.

17:52Warning. The following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated. Or learn even. Like your efforts are futile. And you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just... Fine. F***. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations. Because we find the right people for your roles fast. Which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic. So whether you need to hire four, 40 or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip.

18:53Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board. But then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. Zippercruder doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, Zippercruder finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercruder, the smartest way to hire. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free. That's right. Free at zippercruder.com slash zip. That zippercruder.com slash zip. Zippercruder.com slash zip. Warning, the following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled

19:56with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated. For Lauren even. Like your efforts are futile. And you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations. Because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic. So, whether you need to hire four, 40 or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip.