In 2023, a YouTube ‘mom-fluencer’ named Ruby Franke shocked viewers when she was outed as a horrible monster that abused her children. I won’t recap it, but you can read about it here. Ruby and her accomplice, another YouTuber named Jodi Hildebrandt, were sentenced to 30 years in prison last February. The case shone a spotlight on the genre, which is also known on TikTok as “MomTok.” It also renewed concerns about the children who are starring in these videos.
Utah, where the Frankes live, is a family influencer hotspot. In their heyday, the Franke children starred in up to five videos per week and had 2.5 million viewers. Following Ruby’s conviction, the state’s legislature has just passed new legislation to add protections for child influencers. The law gives these kids the option to have their underage content deleted once they’re adults and mandates that money be set aside for children who appear on social media or in film and TV projects be set aside for them in a trust. California, Illinois, and Minnesota have already passed similar laws.
Utah on Tuesday added new protections for the children of online content creators following the child abuse conviction of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed parenting advice to millions on YouTube before her arrest in 2023.
Gov. Spencer Cox signed a law under the encouragement of Franke’s now ex-husband that gives adults a path to scrub from all platforms the digital content they were featured in as minors and requires parents to set aside money for kids featured in content. Kevin Franke told lawmakers in February that he wished he had never let his ex-wife post their children’s lives online and use them for profit.
“Children cannot give informed consent to be filmed on social media, period,” he said. “Vlogging my family, putting my children into public social media, was wrong, and I regret it every day.”
The Frankes launched the now-defunct “8 Passengers” channel on YouTube in 2015 and began chronicling daily life as a seemingly tight-knit Mormon family in Springville, Utah. With its large nuclear families and religious lifestyles, the state is a hotbed for the lucrative family blogging industry. The reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” brought widespread attention to a group of Utah-based Mormon moms and TikTok creators known as “MomTok” who create videos about their families and faith.
The content-creation industry is largely unregulated, but several states have added certain safeguards in recent years. Illinois, California and Minnesota have enacted laws protecting the earnings of young creators, and Minnesota’s law includes a similar provision to Utah’s that allows content featuring minors to be taken down.
In a memoir published after her mother’s arrest, Shari, the eldest child, described how Ruby Franke’s obsession with “striking content gold” and chasing views led her to view her children as employees who needed to be disciplined, rather than children who needed to be loved. Shari wrote that her mother directed the children “like a Hollywood producer” and subjected them to constant video surveillance. She has called herself a “victim of family vlogging” and alluded in her book to early signs of abuse from her mother, including being slapped for disobedience when the now 22-year-old was 6.
Under the Utah law, online creators who make more than $150,000 a year from content featuring children will be required to set aside 15% of those earnings into a trust fund that the kids can access when they turn 18. Parents of child actors appearing in TV or film projects will also be required to place a portion of their earnings in a trust.
At a hearing last month, Kevin Franke read statements in support of the bill written by two of his daughters, ages 16 and 11. He filed for divorce shortly after his wife’s arrest and petitioned to regain custody of his children from the state. His lawyer, Randy Kester, did not respond to email and phone messages over the past week seeking to confirm whether Kevin Franke had regained custody in the sealed case.
Eve Franke, the youngest child who police found emaciated with her head shaved, wrote in a statement to lawmakers that they had power to protect other kids from exploitation.
“I’m not saying YouTube is a bad thing. Sometimes it brings us together,” she wrote. “But kids deserve to be loved, not used by the ones that are supposed to love them the most.”
I remember when YouTube started regulating the monetization of children’s content. It was aimed at protecting the kids who were watching videos. I think Utah’s new law to protect the kids who are starring in these videos is a good start. However, I don’t think it goes far enough. Why pick $150,000 as the threshold? Families making $50k a year can also be f-cking up their kids. Where are the protections to at least try and protect their mental, emotional, and physical health? Can they somehow do welfare checks? Rules were put into place for child actors in Hollywood for a reason. Does TikTok also have any regulations? Who is protecting child influencers from their own parents? There’s also the fact that kids just want to be kids. Sure, it may be fun to be “famous” for a little while but at the end of the day, it’s a job and those children will eventually be miserable about the normal childhood that they’re missing out on.
Photo note by CB: Photos are screenshots from the trailer for the YouTube documentary Devil in the Family and from 8 Passengers on YouTube. The children whose faces are shown in these screenshots are now adults who participated in the documentary
Good. I watched the doc series and do feel like the cultlike culture of the mormon church was a huge part of the issue. If only laws were made in that regard as well.
I don’t think any child should have their entire life from morning to night, day after day, growing up, on view, for millions of people to watch and rewatch, all the way into adulthood.
exactly – the kids have to wait until they’re adults to request the content be scrubbed from platforms and, by then, the damage is done (not to mention, once it’s out there, it’s out there even after being removed from the original platform).
These kids need protection WHILE they’re being commodified by their parents. They need unbiased people advocating for them as their parents have a vested interest in making sure the kids claim to be fine with it and can take punitive action against the kids behind closed doors
Exactly. THIS is the issue. Throwing money at it when they’re 18 doesn’t even come close to touching the real problem — that they are emotionally damaged throughout childhood and beyond. Also agree that the $150k threshold is weak sauce. So if the parent makes $140k off their kid, they get to keep all the blood money.
I am glad laws are being passed. However, they will never be able to scrub all media traces of these kids lives when they turn 18.
I cringed at these Youtube families before I had ever heard of Ruby Franke. There is just something so….off…about the parents who are really into it. I don’t think they’re all at Ruby Franke’s level of crazy, but they act manic when they’re on their videos. I’ve learned a little more about online addiction recently and it’s being studied that the dopamine high from getting likes and views is similar in the brain as getting high off of drugs – hence why it’s addictive. Adding kids to this mix is not good.
Religious nutter with too many children turns out to be a monstrous abuser. Huh. Where have we seen this narrative play out before? Right. Nearly every time a large religious family has paraded itself publicly as some kind of ideal. And a few who weren’t public figures until a child escaped and begged for help.
I’m really curious about this father’s argument for why he thinks he should get his kids back. Is he trying to claim that he, too, was a victim of his wife’s abuse? Or that he was somehow so checked out that he was unaware of what was going on and the extent of her abuses?
I agree. I think he had moved out at some point and claims he didn’t know how bad it was but I call BS. Moms like this belong in prison but so do the dads – he should face consequences too. Situations like this always make me think of Andrea Yates and her husband. He was treated like the victim when he was actually the villain. But when it comes to families we blame the moms and excuse the dads.
he is claiming he was completely unaware because he was brainwashed too and, to a certain extent he was BUT he defended everything she did when he was still living with the family so while he may have been unaware and he was “brainwashed” to think Shari cutting him off completely from the children was OK (because making her willing to take him back was what was important to him), that doesn’t mitigate the fact that he completely abrogated every responsibility he had to his children. He should never regain custody of them but I think Utah is one of those states that puts reunification at the top of it’s priority list
I also will never understand how he was so brainwashed that he not only moved out of the house but that he agreed to have 0 contact with any of the children. His 17yo was kicked out at the same time and, instead of at least demanding the 17yo live with him Kevin allowed the 17yo to just be set out to drift. Shari was in college but wasn’t cut off completely until Kevin told Ruby that Shari tried to contact him so he was in contact with Ruby at her whim but never so much as asked for any updates on his children, let alone to see them, for over a year. Also, even after Ruby told him what the younger children had told the cops, he went out of his way to protect her – even after he saw what shape the kids were in.
Yes, there a lot of things from him that don’t add up. I will say, the Mormon church runs on family systems of people who have been groomed from birth to accept the absolute divine authority of the church and whoever/whatever the church says is good, and most come from generations of ppl who have believed that. The “counselor” that moved in with them and did the brainwashing that tipped everything into cuckoo banana land was approved by the church.
I can believe he was easily brainwashed, but it shouldn’t have been able to persist so strongly that he was a year of no contact with his kids and almost no contact with the people who were brain washing him. He didn’t even file when he saw what she’d done to the babies. There’s something off with him too.
Something needs to be done to protect these kids bc the parents aren’t. I read an article about moms that manage their young daughters accounts and they’re selling private photos and leotards to predators. I saw another post about a young girl on tiktok whose mom shared videos of her eating certain foods and those videos have a huge amount of likes or saves. And now with AI someone can take your likeness and make a video of whatever they want. It’s going to be interesting to see when these kids grow up and start doing more tell alls.
Yes, that’s my outrage also. I don’t know how the cognitive dissonance happens with that.
Someone I was friends with 15 years ago and am still fb friends with is an example I think of often. She’s someone who would repost those, watch out in target, moms! There’s people out here trying to steal your kids! And then when her daughter turned 11/12 she tried out to be an “ambassador” for some cheerleading line of clothing and was picked. And then the mom turned her insta account (that I didn’t even know I was following because she never posted) into her daughter’s social media account as part of her “duties.” I was suddenly seeing daily posts of her daughter in essentially long line sports bras and cheer skirts, and there were tons of comments by older men saying how cute she was. It was disturbing, open, and the (highly educated) mom was just so proud of the ambassador thing. She saw no connection between the boogeymen she’d been posting about and the actual predators who were for real in her daughters orbit 🤢
I’m happy about this new law and hoping those Ballerina Farm couple are now looked at closer. They don’t look abusive what so ever but I definitely question the child safety at that farm.