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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, March 31st. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Social media can be an alluring corner of the internet, a canvas of beautiful places, encouraging how-tos, and funny animal videos. But sometimes, behind the so-called highlight reel of life is a dark side we rarely see. Today, we're exploring how states are taking action, especially when it comes to the exploitation of child influencers.
Utah has become the fourth state to pass legislation that puts guardrails around parents who broadcast their families' lives on Instagram and YouTube and earn megabucks for it. With the stroke of his pen, Republican Governor Spencer Cox has extended, with bipartisan agreement, the rights of child TV stars to child Internet stars. Wall Street Journal reporter Zusha Ellenson has been covering a case that's been the catalyst for action on this issue today.
But before we dive into that, Zusha, tell us exactly what this new law in Utah does. Yeah, this is like protections for the modern child actor. These are kids who are appearing in influencer videos on YouTube and Instagram.
and they're extending protections that have normally been extended to child actors to them, requiring parents to set aside some money for them when they turn 18, and interestingly, giving kids the right to take down embarrassing videos when they turn 18. The reason that this bill has come about is that Utah is ground zero for mom influencers. There are just tons of family influencers out of Utah.
You'll see a lot of big Mormon families going about their daily life, filming how they cook meals, how they garden, how they take care of their kids. And it's just become extremely popular. So they're trying to regulate how the kids are treated in some of those videos. And we'll get into that trend in a minute. But first, I want to drill down a little bit into how this bill came about in the first hearing for it.
Last October, a 21-year-old woman named Sherry Franke spoke to the Utah legislature about the kind of abuse that she had been subjected to as a child of a woman named Ruby Franke. The camera never stops, and there is no such thing as a break from filming.
At the time I tell you I had a choice in what was filmed, but I've come to learn that every child influencer in a way suffers from Stockholm syndrome. Most child influencers would probably tell you they have full control over what is posted, but the reality is that their parents bribe and shame them into posting their most vulnerable moments. Zusha.
Sherry had been the one sort of pushing for this kind of legislation after her mother, Ruby, was sentenced to prison in February of last year for child abuse. For people who are not familiar with this case and this incident, can you just walk us through who Ruby Franke is and how she was really able to leverage social media platforms to essentially profit off of her own actions?
family suffering. Yeah, so Ruby Franke was one of these mom influencers from Utah, a Mormon family. They had six kids. They made this YouTube channel called Eight Passengers that grew incredibly rapidly to about 2.5 million subscribers by 2020. They had over a billion views, and they just showed everyday family life, what they were cooking for the kids, how they disciplined the kids, how they managed their big family.
But things really fell apart in 2020 when one of their sons mentioned casually on the video that he'd been sleeping on a beanbag chair in the basement for punishment, for being defiant for seven whole months. And viewers grew alarmed. And then they started to pick apart the videos and saw others sort of what they saw as cruel and unusual punishment by the mom, Ruby Franke.
And the channel really died down. Ruby separated from her husband, Kevin. And then things took a really, really dark turn. She moved in with a new business partner, a therapist. And one day, one of her sons escaped from their new home. And he showed up on the doorstep of a neighbor pleading to be taken to the police. He was malnourished, hadn't been fed. And police did a really big investigation. They found that Ruby and her new business partner had been
abusing these kids, beating them, not feeding them. And these two women, they pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison. And it was really this case, the Ruby Frankie scandal, that set Utah on the path to try to regulate this practice of family influencers. Utah is a red state. Lawmakers are really wary about regulating family activities. They don't like government intrusion into families.
So it was really inspired by this Ruby Franke scandal and her family coming out and speaking for this bill. And really, until her children began to expose what had been happening in reality behind the camera, nobody really knew about this. And Ruby and her husband and her business partner were able to make a lot of money off of this.
YouTube was the platform of choice, but it wasn't just showcasing her family. It was also earning money off of brand partnerships and clicks to the channel and things like that. Absolutely. So the abuse allegations were really horrific, but even before the abuse grew so extreme,
Sherry Franke, her eldest daughter, talks about what it was like to be in an influencer family in her memoir. And she really pulls back the curtain. She felt like she was under constant surveillance and she just wanted to be left in peace, particularly in her teen years. She just said it was excruciating every day to have to perform for the cameras.
On top of that, she had all these disgusting online comments she had to read about her and her brother and her family. And so overall, she's been pushing for this bill to have kids paid and have the right to take down content. But she really just wants to end the practice of family vlogging altogether. The guardrails are up, but how easy will these new rules be to enforce? We'll be back with WSJ's Zusha Ellenson to talk about that and more after the break.
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It's human instinct to be curious about things you're not familiar with, and social media has provided us with a steady diet to feed that curiosity. It's allowed people to showcase versions of themselves or their families that they want the world to see. And that content drives traffic to pages and money into pockets.
WSJ reporter Zusha Ellenson has been telling us about Ruby Frankie, a mom who celebrated the seemingly ordinary life of her family of eight on YouTube. That helped her amass more than a billion views on her channel and allowed it to become the family's primary source of income. But she was later convicted of abusing her children in the process of monetizing their embarrassment and suffering.
Zusha, Utah was a place where this style of family vlogging really took off. Just explain why. Yeah, certainly. So the Franke family got most of their income from this YouTube channel, just to give you an idea. And they had 2.5 million followers.
One of the most popular channels is Ballerina Farms, a woman who has eight children, talks about raising her kids in Utah. She was a ballerina. She has over 10 million followers on Instagram. You have this fascination with these Utah moms on TikTok, and there's a new reality show called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
And that's airing its second season. So really having this moment where there's this boom in influencers from Utah. And it's interesting, the state was pretty happy about this because it sort of showcased one of their most prized assets, which is families. I mean, Utah is known for its family life. There's always been an encouragement in the Mormon community for moms to make a living from the home, to bring in some money to help the family. They've done like multi-level marketing stuff. And now this is another way that they can help the family from the home by
showing videos, taking pictures of their family and that sort of thing. So it really fit with the culture, but it all turned sour with the Ruby Frankie scandals.
And as you mentioned, Utah is not the first state to put guardrails on this industry, but it is the first red state to do so. And as you also mentioned, Sherry Franke, Ruby's daughter, has welcomed this new law, but she really wants to just end this practice altogether. You spoke to a Utah lobbyist who also represented content creators during the negotiations over this bill, and he told you that a lot of the creators were
were supportive of this new law. Right. So that was a surprise to me. You might think that content creators would say, this bill is going to make business not worth doing. I don't want to have to figure out how to pay my kids, all that sort of stuff. But because of the gravity of the Ruby Frankie scandal, the content creators did not say no. They said, yes, let's go along with this bill. Let's negotiate some different ways to pay the kids so they got more flexibility in the way they can pay their kids. But they did not put up a big roadblock, which was interesting to this lobbyist.
There was one interesting thing I heard from the Illinois lawmaker who passed their law. He said that they wanted to have a provision in there that gave the kids the right to take down embarrassing content like Utah did. But the social media companies lobbied pretty hard against that, he said. And so they took it out. In California, where the bill passed, some influencers said they were going to leave the state. But you
But yeah, certainly we've had four states now that have passed these bills, three of them Democratic states, one Utah. And there's a bunch of other states now considering them. My biggest question is,
around enforcement of a law like this because it sets out a lot of the guardrails what parents have to do they have to set aside money so that their kids who are really the stars of these shows eventually get paid for this work that they're doing but what does the enforcement mechanism look like for this if we take the Frankie case as an example is it until someone in the family speaks out about it does someone have to identify it are there regular check-ins
So the way it works is that when a child turns 18, they can go to court and they can get embarrassing or worse content taken down, or they can go to court to ask for the money from their parents. But there's no social influence or police out there enforcing this law at all. It's all on the kids. I'm very curious about that because you know how it goes. I mean, if people aren't really enforcing the law, will people follow it? That's a huge question.
That was WSJ reporter Zusha Ellenson. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Emily Martosi. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.