1206: Taylor Lorenz | How Child Influencers Become Predator Magnets

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Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Whether these girls' accounts are being monetized or not, a lot of older men want to follow pre-teen girls or teen girls.

And you can imagine why.

It's not because they're interested in what they have to say.

And I think that once you start to see these like weird Telegram links appear, or the subscription base becomes mostly men, you have to ask why and if you want to cultivate this audience.

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Today on the show, imagine your nine-year-old has a bigger Instagram following than most adults.

Brands are sending over free clothes, followers are in the tens of thousands, and then maybe you realize that most of those followers are grown-ass men that you've never met.

Some are leaving sexual comments, others are messaging you, offering money for private photos, some are convicted sex offenders, and the platform, it's not doing anything about that, it's not stopping them.

In fact, the algorithm is helping them find your child faster.

Today, journalist and author Taylor Lorenz pulls back the curtain on the booming and largely unregulated world of child influencers.

How do predators find these accounts so easily?

Why are parents willing to risk it in the first place?

And what happens when a quest for social media fame and fortune turns into a predator's candy store?

We cover all this and more.

We're also going to get into the money, the content, houses, the sweatshop type labor we find with these kids working crazy hours to produce videos for Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more.

Here we go with Taylor Lorenz.

Fun book.

It follows the rise of Facebook and Friendster in MySpace.

The book is called Extremely Online.

We'll link to it in the show notes, but you're the exception.

But when's the last time everyone else has heard the word Friendster?

It's been a minute.

Slash, if you were born in to, if you're under 30, you're like, what's that?

So it was fun to see how these things all blend together.

Then it's like, oh, this is going to be a fun read.

And then I started reading the articles you've written for various outlets.

And I have to say that some of the articles that I read, not just yours, but some of the articles that I read in preparation for this interview is some of the most disturbing stuff that I've read here in 2025.

No exaggeration.

And we'll get to all that in a bit.

But this topic goes from like, hey, social media changed the world and everyone's connected.

And then it gets gross like really, really fast with the kids' stuff.

Yeah, it goes off the rails pretty quickly.

Not pretty quickly, but it took, we had a good 20 years maybe before it got truly dystopian.

It's gross to see some of the New York Times expose.

And I've got a whole segment on that in here in a minute.

But I thought it was kind of funny.

You mentioned.

some of these influencer ladies and stuff early in the game.

And I dated a couple of those people, not Paris Hilton, maybe another.

And I remember meeting them because my friends from law school were like, you got to meet my friend so-and-so.

And I remember saying, they're like, what do you do?

I haven't seen you on any of the blogs.

And I was like, no, blogging is going out.

I have a podcast.

And I remember one girl goes, ew.

And coincidentally, still the same reaction I get from women when I tell them I have a podcast.

Well, you were really early on the podcast.

You were really early on that.

Yes.

And because that format, I would say, it wasn't really ascendant until like like more recently.

I think it's become sort of a dominant.

That's true.

I've been doing this for about 18 years.

And I will say at least a dozen of those years, people would go, what's a podcast?

And then it was like after maybe serial came out and a couple of other really big hits, people were like, oh, okay.

Or the early ones were like, well, you mean like kind of like a Joe Rogan thing on YouTube?

And it's like, no.

It's audio.

And they're like, why?

Then it became like the rise of cereal and the crime junkie.

And then people started, it went from what's that to how old do I look?

Like, of course I know what a podcast is.

And it's like even people's grandmas know.

But I remember telling some of these influencer people that you write about in the book early on, I was like, hey, what you're doing is much harder than what I'm doing.

You have to struggle and maintain relevance all the time.

You have to do all kinds of crazy stuff.

And I remember it was like, there's a sex tape with Paris Hilton.

Like, I'm never going to have to, no one wants to see a Jordan Harbinger sex tape.

And I never have to make one.

But the thing is, they were doing it for fame, not only to make a living.

And that's a really tough racket.

To make a living podcasting, much easier than trying to become famous on the internet and also make a living doing it.

It's just a different game.

Yeah.

I think also, it's so funny.

I discovered your podcast in 2016 because I was on the campaign trail.

Oh, nice.

And I would just have these long stretches of time where I didn't really have anything to do.

And so I started to listen to podcasts, which at that time, I think, was also around the serial era.

And I was like, well, is there anyone that's just sort of chatting and talking about interesting things?

And there weren't that many out there.

So I think you were there.

Not really.

But it was, like you mentioned, a lot of the people that were trying to get famous on the internet, it was this more like parasocial thing where like they were really talking about their lives, you know, on Instagram.

It was more like celebrity adjacent rather than, I think, what you were doing in podcasting, where it was more like, hey, let me talk to this interesting person or here's an interesting topic.

Despite the fact that the show is called the Jordan Harbinger Show, which is like the least creative title ever.

And I chose that because I split off from this other show, right?

And it was like, I want to make sure that people can find me.

And what are people searching for?

Oh, they're searching for my name.

So the actual best name would have been What Happened to Jordan Harbinger, but that's an even worse name than the Jordan Harbinger Show.

And the show doesn't answer that question.

So that would have been the number one sort of Google that involved my name or show.

But these other influencers and more increasingly what we see on the topics you write about is people monetizing essentially their own life.

And the focus of this show, show, or at least where I want to try to go with it, is the idea that the fact that kids are more and more being monetized by parents, if I can phrase it that way, that's, I feel like I'm missing something.

Like children's lives are essentially, it's no longer like, hi, I'm traveling in China.

We have those guys, right?

But now you have like, we're a family and here's all my kids.

And the kids are kind of the stars of it.

It's very dance mom.

Yes.

Can you give us an overview of this?

Because this is, again, where the topic goes off the rails really quick.

Cause it's like, here's my daughter.

She does dancing.

Isn't it cute?

And then it's like, yes, some people think it's cute and other people are following for different reasons.

Exactly.

And the people that are buying the subscriptions might not be the people that you

know, it's so interesting because when I was reporting my book, and if you've read my book, I actually talk a lot about the origins of the influencer economy and where it came from.

And actually, the first people to really monetize and commodify their lives and sort of make a living as influencers, as you mentioned, were bloggers and specifically mommy bloggers.

So it was people like Heather Armstrong, known online as Deuce, and some of these other women that were Gen X women that came of age.

They sort of were having their kids early aughts.

And they discovered blogging because they were at home bored, basically, or frustrated, lonely.

And so blogging became this outlet and they were really countering this notion of motherhood that was put forward in traditional media.

So traditional women's media at the time was like really regressive, didn't talk about like the realities of motherhood.

It was not very candid.

They didn't talk about things like struggling to breastfeed or like hating your husband sometimes.

And so these moms came online and were really open about their lives and amassed millions of followers, readers at the time and started to do brand deals and all this stuff.

But I think what's so interesting is how different those mommy bloggers were.

Because when you say mommy blogger today, and I encountered this a lot when I was promoting my book, people think exactly what you described, like, oh, these women on YouTube that promote everything in their life.

Actually, back then, because blogging was pretty stigmatized, it was sort of seen as not cool.

Those mommy bloggers were primarily anonymous.

They were doing stuff in written form.

So they had a lot of them pseudonyms for their kids.

They didn't really upload pictures of their kids.

Some of the bigger ones did.

The kids weren't the star of the show.

It was very much about these moms' internal lives and monologues and how they felt.

So it was just really different.

But I think it's interesting that even from the beginning of the influencer economy, children were a part of it and children's lives were basically being contentified or whatever from the earliest days.

But those women were actually quite feminist and quite progressive.

And it wasn't really like, I mean, the Mormons had a strong presence, but it wasn't what we think of now, which is, as you said, today, it's more of an offshoot of the dance moms, the Mormon moms, the pageant culture that kids are sort of funneled into.

Yeah, pageant culture is a good way to put it.

And for people who are not watching all this weird stuff on Netflix, I think they still kind of know what that is, right?

They go, yeah, that's when like an eight-year-old is dressed up kind of like an adult and they have to parade around on stage and it's a little bit creepy, but you can't quite put your finger on it sometimes.

And it doesn't have to be creepy, but it ends up creepy anyways.

It's important to note, right?

Just from my lawyer brain is going, hey, when you're 12 or eight or seven, you can't consent to your photos being put online.

And generally, we didn't have to worry about that.

And we generally we don't have to worry about that, right?

The photos that my wife puts online of our kids, you have to request to follow her on Instagram.

If she doesn't know you, she says no.

It's our kids eating or a drawing they made or something like that, and them smiling.

It's not a creepy thing.

These incentives to post things that are not, I don't want to use the word racy because that's even more gross.

But an image of your daughter in a photograph or something like that with a drawing she made is going to get a certain number of clicks from your friends and family.

But if you get paid for the amount of views your videos get and they're facing the public, this is when things start to go kind of off the rails.

Can you tell us how the money works?

Maybe that's a good place to start with some of this because then people can go, oh, I see.

So now you're incentivized to make more money by doing more things that are maybe not in the best interest of the kid.

Yeah.

So as the influencer economy moved from blogging in the aughts into like social media in the 2010s, it got a lot more visually driven.

So you started to see people move towards Instagram, which at the time was photos and then videos, and YouTube, especially these like family channels on YouTube.

Actually, a lot of people don't know, but the first ever content house in 2009, which was called The Station, they got a content house.

A lot of people are familiar with them from TikTok, The Hype House.

This type of thing started in 2009 because a family, the Shea family, a family vlogger.

moved to LA and needed a house.

And so a bunch of other influencers would come over to that house, but that's kind of where he was living with his family as well.

Oh, wow.

So I think it's interesting also that the first ever content house was like also a family vlogging house.

That is weird.

So it started like basically things got more visual.

And as things got more visual, a lot of these influencers started to put content of their children into their daily content mix, right?

Like their YouTube channels.

And you started to see things like, for instance, people commenting timestamps.

So this was a problem that YouTube actually later addressed, but they'd have these like family videos being uploaded or kids playing outside in the yard.

And people would comment one colon 24 or whatever, right?

A timestamp on the video.

When you clicked on that time stamp, it would be the girl doing the splits or some sort of suggestive pose from the child.

And so it started to be really weird.

And these were from anonymous accounts.

It's not like other children necessarily commenting this stuff for sure.

And monetization-wise, a lot of these videos started to get a lot of views in a way where it was suspect whether children were watching, right?

Because a lot of this stuff, you know, with something like Ryan's Toys, who's a child influencer, Ryan is a child who does toy reviews.

That channel is undeniably primarily watched by children.

It's unproblematic.

Ryan is paid.

He's with a management company that is very ethical.

Like, he doesn't work a certain amount of hours a day, whatever.

But it's more like these family channels, I think, that there started to be some questions over, like, who actually are the subscribers.

As you mentioned, the money was started to really come in in the mid-2010s.

And that's when you started to see brand deals, brands pour money in, and people get paid off views.

I see.

That started to accelerate.

Then TikTok came along and made it easy for anyone to become an influencer.

And you just saw like this explosion of family influencer channels.

So they get paid per view, essentially, and they get paid on just similar to the show, you know, I'll sell something on YouTube and they'll say, we want 2.8 million impressions across a maximum of n number of videos so that I don't have to, it doesn't take 10 years for me to deliver them.

Right.

And I'll be like, all right, I'm going to make you 15 videos and it's going to get that many impressions or whatever it is.

And it's an ad for drinkable ketones or something like that.

And they get paid for those brand deals.

But then YouTube also has this AdSense model where Google will run, I don't know, a Lexus ad or something like that, and they get paid for that.

So the idea is you want people to watch for as long as possible and you want people to watch the whole video, ideally.

And the more videos you put out, the more you get paid.

This is a little bit of a generalization, but it works for most.

And I'm saying that because I think most people listening are like, I actually don't know how people get paid on YouTube or I didn't realize people got paid on YouTube.

There's people who don't know this world at all.

And the timestamp thing, I didn't know about that.

That's extra creepy.

And I think just to put a fine point on it for people who didn't quite get the reference there, what you're saying is these are not kids watching these other kids outside playing in the sprinkler.

The people putting in the timestamps are weird, perverted dudes, probably who are like, oh, if you're looking for something gross to look at, don't worry about the first minute in 24 seconds because it's them eating hot dogs or something with their mom.

Skip to 124 where she is, like you said, doing the splits and the sprinkler or something like that.

And it's like, that's the first clue that it's not just my kids who are six watching another kid play with a Transformer toy and being like, daddy, I want that, right?

That's the point of those Ryan's World videos.

This is like something else entirely.

And what's disturbing is, I would assume, I don't know if you have kids.

I do.

I have two little kids.

If I made a video of them and just sort of put it up and it got a bunch of views and then I noticed that there were timestamps and the timestamps was my daughter, I don't know, bending over in front of the camera and making a funny face.

That would be disturbing enough for me to cancel the whole channel.

But that unfortunately is not what happens to many of these channels.

So can you explain this?

Because I think a lot of parents go, and this is why my kids will never be on social media.

And other parents are like, this is why we crapped out our family social media channel because we had weirdos that found it and we don't know how it happened.

But there's a certain percentage of people, and this is not a small number.

They just kind of say like, ah, there's a few of those, but whatever.

And also, we made $100,000 last month.

So what are you complaining about?

We're willing to tolerate a little bit of risk.

It's not like they know where we live.

Right.

And they do know where you live, by the way, because everybody knows everything.

Yeah.

I think the thing is, is we talked about pageant culture earlier, right?

There are certain sections of society, culture, whatever, where the parents seem to be tacitly okay with their kids being sexualized in these certain ways or viewed in these certain ways, or the monetary incentives outweighs the concerns they have.

And I do think some of these parents do delude themselves.

They see the checks coming in and they sort of don't want to think about it that hard because to think about it that hard means jeopardizing this massive income, which can change.

Or they make these trade-offs where they're like, well, yeah, there might be some creeps, but this is going to pay for our daughter's college fund or whatever.

Or, you know, well, it's YouTube's problem to crack down on the creeps.

And I still, you know, whatever.

We make family content.

I think it's this tough trade-off.

I'm sympathetic to that.

And I can sort of talk about the ethics of how I think these parents should go about it.

In one sense, we don't want to say that, oh, we need to ban all young girls from the internet or something like that but i do think that some of these parents they are putting makeup on their children or they are feeding into some of this stuff in a way or selling subscriptions if you're selling subscriptions and michael keller and jen valentino have done amazing reporting on this for the new york times i think you should look at the subscriber base and question whether the subscriber base for your child is mostly men or older people.

Like, what is the goal there?

You know, should you even be selling subscriptions to content for your child?

I don't know.

I will get to the New York Times thing in a bit because that's what I meant when I said some of this stuff is the creepiest stuff I've read in a long time.

Yeah.

Before we jump ahead though, how much are some of these families making?

I mean, do you have a range?

Because some of them are fantastically wealthy off of this and others are probably like we doubled our income in this median middle income area, which is also fantastic.

I think most of us would take a 100% pay increase for filming our family.

But then, you know, if we didn't know about the dark side of things, I should say.

Yeah.

The money has been pouring in in the past few years because influencer marketing continues to grow.

We're seeing this broad shift towards personality-driven media.

Brands want to be part of everyone's life.

Like they want to monetize every brand moment as well.

Like they monetize the moments in these children's lives, in the family's lives.

If the family's moving, if the daughter has her first period, if there's back to school, literally, I mean, there's SpawnCon for that sort of thing.

The brands want to be part of these family moments because this is, they want people to think of Dove soap when whatever.

Some people are only making a few hundred dollars a month on TikTok maybe, but some are making millions.

And so there is quite a range.

If you're really successful on YouTube and TikTok, you are likely making millions of dollars in sponsorship money and stuff and ad revenue.

But a lot of people are not making that.

But again, women are traditionally shut out of labor market.

It's really hard.

COVID pushed a lot of people into sort of working for themselves.

And so the influencer is just, it's an increasingly popular career.

Yeah, I can see the allure.

It's easy to sort of demonize these moms and it's going to get worse, folks, on this show, but it's easy to sort of demonize these moms and go, what are they doing?

These people are terrible.

And some of them genuinely are negligent or reckless or worse.

But I can see the allure of, I've got four kids.

I'm exhausted.

I don't work.

My husband works, but he's working himself to the freaking bone because, again, we have four kids and it's expensive.

And then it's like, oh, you mean to tell me that someone's interested in the cookies and the lunch, cute lunch things that I do for my kids?

And I can put that and make a video of that.

And then I start getting the cookie cutter stuff for free and I can use all this cute stuff.

And then you build your following on that.

And it's like, wait, you're going to pay me to make cute cookies and cupcakes for me.

You're going to pay for the whole birthday party and give me all the stuff for free and cut me a check if I film everything and tag your brand in it.

That's a pretty damn good deal for most people.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is it can be kind of a slippery slope.

I doubt any mom goes out there and goes, you know what I want to do?

I want to monetize my daughter's first period by reaching out to a bunch of tampon brands.

That's not how this begins.

That's not the first thing you jump on.

Often the brands reach out to the parents too.

You might not start there where you're thinking of that, but then a brand comes through and is like, oh, by the way, notice your daughter's getting older.

Like, we'd love to send some products.

Like, we'd love to have it featured.

And I do want to say that, like, there is a lot of the most popular parenting channels, mommy bloggers, they're what are considered trad wives.

So people are familiar with this woman, Hannah Needleman, Ballerina Farm.

I think she has like seven or nine kids.

Wow.

And a lot of these women are also Mormon.

They also

feel that motherhood is this sacred thing.

A part of what is some of these parents too, like want to show their lifestyle.

And that is very ingrained in their culture, like especially in the Mormon culture.

Blogging has been a thing for a long time.

A lot of these women are involved in multi-level marketing schemes as well, prior, you know, to the social media thing.

So some of these women, they really feel that.

They want to promote this idea that women should be at home, women should be with the children.

They want to show the children.

They want to show their like trad wife life that's really aspirational.

And this is a growing category, especially.

I think a lot of people have heard about trad wives and stuff like this.

Tell us what that is because I've heard of this, but I don't think most people have.

And also, I'm not even 100% sure I know the full definition.

It just means traditional wife, right?

Yeah, it just means traditional wife.

And these are women that stay at home and ironically commodify every aspect of their lives on the internet, even though they're like promoting this traditional lifestyle.

I think it's a very funny because I think traditionally women are not spending all day editing the TikTok in a traditional life.

But yes, ring lights are usually absent in real traditional

homes.

But essentially, it's promoting the idea that women belong at home, showing that women, you know, should be spending their time cooking and spending their time with children.

And as you mentioned, like making these elaborate lunches, cooking from scratch.

It's sort of about like idealizing this like traditional view of motherhood.

And so you have a lot of trad wives getting into that and then promoting their children as well, because it's like, here's me and my beautiful, perfect children and my homeschool situation.

There's a woman in Texas that I follow who's a, I think she's Mormon, but all of her videos start like, here's how it is as like a mom of five boys, how I do X, Y, Z.

And the kids are in the videos, of course, every time.

And she's talking about how she lives this aspirational.

life where she homeschools all her children and has this beautiful house.

And so it's aspirational content about a certain type of motherhood.

Gotcha.

And these kids are young generally, right?

One through six, seven, eight.

I mean, they're, I'm sure, all ages, especially when you're talking about huge families, because if you've got 11 kids, they're not all under 10 generally.

But you got to wonder what happens when these kids turn 18 and they're like, hey, you filmed my entire childhood and I kind of can't individualize like a normal person in college because it's all.

there when people search my name and people can watch like my third birthday party and I'm 18.

I don't want that anymore.

And I'm kind of mad that you did that.

I would imagine that must happen.

Well, it's so interesting because we've seen now like multi-generations of these kids grow up.

And I would say, Jordan, it's actually a split.

A lot of these kids actually grow up and launch their own careers as influencers.

So like a lot of successful influencers today grew up on family channels or were launched through family content or, you know, they got on the internet very young.

I mean, even Charlie D'Amilio, she started when she was 15.

She wasn't on a family channel, but the D'Amilio family now has a reality show.

Like, there's always been sort of a family aspect to her content.

She's perfectly happy.

She was thrilled that she was able to launch her career as a teenager and become this famous multi-million dollar influencer.

So a lot of kids are totally happy.

A lot of kids also are religious and maybe grow up in these religious households where they view.

Again, like the promotion of this lifestyle as important.

And so they make their own family channels.

Some of them get pregnant very young.

Wow.

But a lot of them are unhappy as well.

Like you said, I think the ones that are unhappy are usually the ones where they didn't end up making millions, right?

So your parent put you out there on the internet, maybe aspirationally, or sometimes like didn't even get monetized, right?

You just sort of overshared for what?

Maybe a couple hundred dollars once or twice.

Yeah.

And now you've had your privacy sort of violated.

I will say one other thing.

I interviewed dozens of children for a story.

This was back actually in 2018.

I'm sure it's even accelerated even more for a story in the Atlantic where I interviewed dozens of children about the first time they Googled themselves and discovered their online footprint and how they felt about it.

And a significant amount of those kids, some of them were upset because they realized, oh my God, I'm in these videos from my classroom.

Oh my God, my preschool had an Instagram account and it's embarrassing.

Kids' lives are being documented.

We can get into all that as well outside these family channels in an obscene way.

But a significant amount of kids, Jordan, were upset that there wasn't more about them on the internet.

And they talked about how they didn't feel like a person without a robust digital footprint.

Wow.

And so they wanted more content about themselves online.

That's interesting.

And I thought that that was an interesting side effect of growing up in this environment where I think kids are conditioned to feel like they cannot process their identity outside of the context of the internet.

That's a radical shift from what we had even, I would say, 10 years ago.

And now for a word from companies that don't rely entirely on child labor.

We'll be right back.

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nobody of i'm 45 nobody cared in high school about being on the internet and then in college it was like

your flex well even in law school your flex was like is your aol instant messenger away message funny That was it.

Nobody had photos of themselves online or anything.

So you got to wonder how the family vlogger job kind of alters the relationship between the kids and the parents because you can't really separate work from family.

And if you're doing cartwheels in the front yard, does it ruin it when your mom comes out with a video camera and tells you to start over and then has to set up the lighting because it's a little bit dusky outside and your face is shadowed weird?

You think working from home is rough sometimes because you can't separate home life from the office.

Imagine your life is your job or your job is your life and you and documenting everything real or not.

That's your career.

I can't say I would be interested in that.

I mean, I can see kids just sort of sitting around in the living room and the parents are like, don't look tired.

Don't be too giggly.

Don't be too happy right now.

Be sad.

No, no, no.

More, be more sad.

And it's like, well, I'm watching a Disney movie.

I'm just having the reaction that I want to have.

No, no, no.

Be super sad that the Lion King, the dad died.

Like, you got to give me some tears.

That's kind of what I'm imagining.

And that's sad to me.

Well, I don't know if you saw that video.

There was a video that went viral.

I think it was like last year of this mom taking a video of the child.

And I think the dog had died.

And she said, look more sad.

Cry.

Cry.

Come on.

We're so sad.

We're so sad.

And I think she's trying to get the child to make a face for the thumbnail.

Certainly that is some parents.

And those parents are

gross, right?

Like you said, they're commodifying it and stuff.

A lot of parents, when you talk to them, they're like, listen, I mean, for instance, I talked to a dad who started a channel that's like, he and his family are really into like outdoor sports.

And he films his ski trips.

They film their adventures with their kids.

They don't really film at-home content, but they've been able to go on these amazing vacations.

And he always says, listen, if my kid doesn't want to be in a video that day, that's totally fine.

But they've been able to have all these amazing experiences.

And I wouldn't trade that for the world.

And they kind of seem cool with it.

I don't think that they mean poorly.

I think there's a lot of parents that try to do it responsibly.

I think what becomes a problem is this influencer economy that we built intersecting with surveillance culture and facial recognition, all of the tech that's coming online now, where these kids have no privacy.

And so I think that having anything about your life on the internet when you're young and you can't dictate the own story of your life is harder for people.

Like I think the biggest luxury you can give your kids is privacy because Sure, it wouldn't have been a big deal maybe 10 years ago because somebody would have had to just go back and watch all that.

But now we have AI systems that can scrape all those videos, can pull out clips, can find your face in any single piece of content online through facial recognition.

It's just the whole becoming a lot more dystopian.

And kids are being tracked and surveilled also, not just through family channels, but through everything, through classroom vlogs, through other people's social media content.

There's all of this filming that's happening in public now.

So kids are just being filmed in random other videos and having weird moments in the back of someone's random other vlog vlog again because people are increasingly filming in public so i get like where these parents are coming from and i'm not going to fault some of the ones that try to do it responsibly

but i think that they are a little bit delusional about where tech is going and like this surveillance infrastructure that we're like hurdling into look there are of course extreme examples and since this is a podcast we're talking about some of these like ruby frank this is his parenting channel where she was kind of like this model parent or whatever but then it didn't she go to prison yeah she was abusing her kids yeah yeah but that's a good example of somebody where it's, she was the one that was like, do it again.

Like you're the content, you know, like there are irresponsible parents.

And what I would say too is there are irresponsible parents out there that act like that that don't monetize, right?

Yeah.

Imagine being punished for that and you don't even get a free

you're not even getting free tampons.

Yeah.

You're getting yelled at all the time.

But yeah, she was doing weird stuff.

Like if their kid forgot their lunch, she would just be like, I'm not bringing it to school.

They get to starve.

And there was a kid, one of the brothers pulled a prank on their sibling and he had to forfeit his bed for for seven months.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just psycho.

And she was ultimately prosecuted.

And I think it's important to note that like when these parents are being abusive, actually the ones that are being abusive on YouTube channels, because they're documenting so much of their life on YouTube channels, it actually makes it a lot easier to prosecute them.

And there's actually more accountability for abusive parents that are vlogging their lives than abusive parents that are not vlogging their lives.

So I like to tell people that are like, oh my God, the child abuse.

Yes.

But ironically, them documenting everything makes it easier.

The real cases of abuse that are harder to prosecute are like when they're not vlogging every aspect of their lives.

You're right.

It's a lot easier to prosecute if you've got a video.

He's fine.

Well, here's a video of you forcing him to jump off the roof into the pool and then him in the hospital with the injury he received.

So we're going to submit that in evidence and you can plead guilty.

Tends to be a little bit easier from a prosecutorial perspective.

There's some funny excerpts when I was reading these articles that really kind of made me chuckle because this has happened to me.

Parents can go years thinking their son or daughter is just an average teen on YouTube or Instagram until one day a marketing manager at a Fortune 500 brand calls the house asking to collaborate, as happened to one mother I spoke to.

This is from an article.

This is like my dad here.

Some parents don't become aware until other kids begin asking their child for selfies in public or when their youngsters begin receiving special treatment at local businesses.

So like I'll be with my parents and someone will be like, are you Jordan Harbinger?

Can I get a photo with you?

It's like my dad had never heard of my podcast.

And he was like, what's that all about?

I'm like, dad,

you understand that the thing i record in the other room over here other people listen to that and that's how i make money right you understand that part it's just like it didn't click until then right it was like how come the restaurant owner knows who you are you know that thing we listen to in the car on the way here

he also heard that at the same time like other people can listen it's just so funny explaining this to my dad who's 80 it's like he gets it but he doesn't get it it's like dad's like the radio Think about it like the radio.

Other people can listen to the radio at the same time.

Just too funny.

There's this crowd control issues.

I think this was another one that I thought was kind of alarming, but interesting.

This is, again, an excerpt from an article.

Because of how quickly things can go awry, most parents I spoke with try to limit the times their children are in public without protection.

That's a little scary.

This leads to families' lives being severely restricted in terms of the things they can do together.

Family movie nights at the local theater are canceled.

Birthday dinners are held in private rather than at a public restaurant.

If the family wants to travel to Disney World or go to a concert, prior arrangements must be made.

Even parents who take the most meticulous cautionary measures see their children's whereabouts tracked 24-7 by fan accounts online.

There are Twitter and Instagram accounts set up by fans to crowdsource sightings of their favorite internet stars and alert followers to their whereabouts everywhere they go.

Because of the global reach of social platforms, most internet stars have fans all over the globe.

And it can seem like no matter where a parent takes their child, they're on the ground.

When a kid's location is revealed, a flash mob can pop up in a matter of minutes.

All it takes is one tweet.

That is not a fun way to live your life.

That novelty dies really fast, I would imagine.

Yeah, I think that's actually the story I wrote for The Atlantic a couple years ago.

But yes, again, this is for the most successful kids, of course, but it can happen even on a local level where you have these sort of local kid celebrities where they go to the water park.

Everyone knows them because, again, they're online.

And I think it's just the dynamics of fame.

Like in the past, that sort of thing would happen to like a Disney star or like Leonardo DiCaprio, right?

When he was, or Miley Sarasota, I guess, when she was a child star.

But now it's sort of like these mid-level average parents that have to deal with fame.

And this is a consequence of the influencer industry becoming so mainstream is that more and more people are sort of suffering the downsides of celebrity.

And they're getting the upsides to a point.

They're getting some money, but they're certainly not getting like the house in Beverly Hills, right?

That like some of these Disney stars got and the 24-7 PR and security that a child star in the past would have.

And so I think it's left a lot of parents struggling.

And a lot of parents, especially when their kids blow up online, will take them out of school.

They'll just be homeschooled.

And a lot of these parents, again, because a lot of the family vloggers are quite religious, they homeschooled their kids anyway.

So the kid already is in a different sort of environment.

But it's very hard for these kids to go to public school.

Sometimes they're bullied or they're sort of aspirational.

I think of this kid.

Are you familiar with the Rizzler?

No, but that's a great name.

Is that his nickname online?

The Rizzler?

Yeah.

So funny.

He recently appeared on Theo Vaughan.

He's a, I think he's an eight-year-old, maybe nine.

Oh, God, that's funny.

Yes.

It's even funnier now that the Rizzler is eight years old.

Yes.

That's so funny.

He's a child.

But, you know, I was talking to his dad about this thing because I was like, you know, the Rizzler is, people call him this generation's Shirley Temple.

He's incredibly popular online.

He blew up on TikTok.

He's a child.

And, you know, I talked to his dad about like, how does he handle this?

And his dad said, you know, I've actually kept him in his regular school and I don't.

I have kept his life as normal as possible.

We're fine.

If he wants to have this career as he can, we'll do these opportunities.

But I want him to have this normal life because the minute his life starts to seem too abnormal, it's going to affect him.

So the Rizzler is still in public school, but I don't know.

He's becoming so famous.

He's on late night TV shows.

And because of his social media presence, I just, you know, the Rizzler, I've heard is asking for six figures for these brand deals.

So he's also making this obscene amount of money that it'll probably set him up for life.

So, you know, I think a lot of parents think, well, they'll pay for the therapy, you know?

Yeah, it'll pay for the therapy.

That's funny.

It's It's also like, you can imagine when he's in high school, he's going to be like, hey, dad, how much money is in that trust account?

Cause I'm a little bit worried about paying for college.

And it's going to be like,

you don't really have to worry about going to college if you don't want to.

And you also don't have to worry about the career you're going to have after college if you don't want to, because you could probably retire and have kids and they also wouldn't have to work because you started earning millions of dollars when you were eight years old.

I mean, there's going to be like 50 million bucks in there, you know?

There are kids that are totally fine because they grew up monetizing their

life when they were young.

Yeah.

And I think they have an identity crisis.

I mean, this is where you start to see these corollaries with other child stars, where even if it's something that they consented to at the time, which children debatably can consent, I would say they can't really consent, but even if they're happy with how it turned out, they're like, listen, I'm a millionaire now at 24 or whatever.

They also experience peak fame very young and their fan base has often moved on.

And they have these like psychological questions about themselves and they struggle to kind of re-identify themselves.

And I think that's when sometimes they turn to addiction or try to reinvent themselves in weird ways or they get super religious.

And like fame does stuff to you.

And I think none of us are prepared for it.

My friend Shep Gordon, he was a manager for like Alice Cooper and a bunch of other really famous people.

I wish I could list more, but I'm drawing a blank here, but it's just very famous rock stars, very.

And

he told me that he's never seen fame do something good for someone.

And basically he told me no one ever comes out the other side better off.

They have money and things like that, but he's like, oh, debatably, you would have been a more adjusted person being less famous.

And so he's got this kind of torn conscience, right?

Because his job is to make his clients really famous and make them a lot of money.

But then he's also like, but I got to warn you.

You're going to make a bunch of money and you're going to be famous.

You're going to get everything you ever wanted.

And you are going, it's going to screw up your whole life.

Yeah.

And nobody believes them, right?

But they're like, I don't care.

My life already is a little bit messy.

I'll handle it.

I'll, you know, I've got you, man.

And it's like, no, no, no, you don't get it.

This is going to be bad.

You just don't see it.

But I've seen it with everybody I've worked with since 19, whatever, 65 or whatever.

He started his career, right?

And it's just interesting to see a guy like that because he's like super nice and normal, but he'll just talk very candidly.

He's like, yeah, this person has this mental illness and he's got this addiction.

And it's like, yeah, it's big.

Fame screws you up.

I want to move on to the New York Times expose because this was hands down one of the grossest things I've read this year.

We'll link to it in the show notes for the Times subscribers.

I don't know if it's like one of those free ones or you have to be logged in to see it, but the New York Times examined 2.1 million Instagram posts, 5,000 mom-run child influencer accounts.

Many parents, particularly mothers, they create and manage Instagram profiles for underage daughters, often to jumpstart modeling careers, get brand deals, get free stuff.

That's how it usually starts.

And a lot of the content's benign, obviously, but many accounts feature highly sexualized imagery.

So bikini stuff, revealing dancewear, suggestive poses, which, as you might predict from where the show has been going, they draw large male followings.

And some of the followings of these little girl accounts are 75 to 90%

male.

And not surprisingly, the investigation found predator access and grooming, men commenting sexually, sending explicit messages, people trying to blackmail them.

I'm not sure how that works.

Maybe you have some inside info.

And that they coordinate in Telegram groups to trade the imagery of minors from Instagram.

They monetize this.

I should probably stop talking now.

Tell me more about this because I've got a lot here, but this is like peak gross when it comes to this.

Yeah, I think Michael Keller and Jen Valentino at the Times have just done some of the best work really investigating, like you said, this creepy aspect of it, which is that there's a lot of creeps.

Men fetishize young women.

And we see this over and over and over again.

This is a broader problem in culture.

Whether these girls' accounts are being monetized or not, a lot of older men want to follow preteen girls or teen girls.

And you can imagine why.

It's not because they're interested in what they have to say.

And unfortunately, I mean, a lot of young people want to monetize online.

Sometimes the parents monetize the children.

Sometimes the teenagers want to monetize their own content, but it is for gross reasons.

Like you said, and I think that once once you start to see these like weird Telegram links appear or the subscription base becomes mostly men, you have to ask why and if you want to cultivate this audience.

It is sort of, there was a lot of controversy recently because Lil Tay, who was a child influencer, who was actually being managed by her older brother, got famous when she was nine.

She was known as like the youngest flexer on the internet.

And she was making these ridiculous videos and like these Lamborghinis with money and stuff when she was a child.

She became really famous.

And then she recently launched an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday.

Oh, geez.

That's like the cliche that nobody wanted to hear about, right?

Yeah.

But listen, she made millions of dollars and she sort of clickbaited these men.

She said, I took these photos at 12.01 a.m.

The minute after I turned 18 and now you can buy them.

And I think the type of men that are going to buy images of a girl at 12.01 a.m.

on her 18th birthday, like all those people should be on a list, in my opinion.

Which is funny because now they are.

Thanks to the OnlyFans purchase record, they are on a list.

And I hope the FBI has that list.

So she kind of clickbaited them because she ultimately did the images were actually safe for work.

So she just, I think, took pictures in her bedroom.

And they were, so the men were kind of mad, like, oh, we thought these were going to be racy.

But she's not against doing more racy images.

She sort of talked about doing that.

And this is not the first girl that has done this.

Like, there's these girls that will amass a large following and then flip it.

Young gymnasts.

I talked to a gymnast influencer who was like, listen, I am not as as good as Livy Dunn or Dune, who's this like famous teen influencer gymnast who became a college star, like, but I know that there's mostly men on here.

I want to make my millions to pay for my athletic career.

And I don't really care if these men want to sexualize me.

I don't care.

They're going to steal my photos off the internet anyway.

I'm not doing any not safe for work stuff, but I get it.

And they're fine being sexualized.

You know, I don't know.

Once they're 18, it is their prerogative to do that.

They're adult women, technically.

I think the broader problem is that we have a society that sexualizes young girls.

And that until we fix that broader societal problem, like there's going to be this audience on the internet.

And I'm not a parent, but I would not allow my child to monetize in that way before they were 18.

Before they were 18, yeah.

But the article says, this Times article, parents sell exclusive photos, videos, and chat access, which God, I hope the kid is not doing that.

No, but those chats can get explicit, especially as people are relying on AI.

So one influencer, yeah, one influencer, she is over 18, but she set up a chat bot and she said that almost immediately every the audience wanted to have explicit conversations.

Geez.

And these are 99 cents to 250 a month.

And again, we're talking about this article specifically talking about underage little girls.

Yes, children.

Some push subscription only bikini weeks or provocative themes.

These parents should be, easy for me to say, in jail.

Bikini week for your nine-year-old dance daughter is so gross that I don't understand how this is.

I mean, I guess I understand how it's legal from a technical perspective, but you are the worst parent if you're doing this to your kid.

And

man, and then the incentives are aligned poorly, right?

The brand kind of doesn't care if you have a large male audience despite something inappropriate, right?

They're just kind of looking at the demographics and some giant sales tool and going, oh, this little girl influencer has a bunch of guys looking at her, I don't know, gymnastics stuff.

We want to advertise this Lexus to as many guys as possible.

So we're going to pay.

Very rarely does the buyer go, why are so many men following this young girl?

And is that troublesome?

Right.

They're buying tens of millions, hundreds of millions of impressions at once.

I don't want to give them a total pass.

They should probably flag these.

But as of right now, the incentives are misaligned.

And then, you know, the algorithms, man, if you're getting a lot of comments, even if they're really gross dudes doing it and they're sending hearts and weird emojis, that's what tells the algorithm that your backflip photo or your sprinkler thing is something worth engaging on.

That to me is just like all of the incentives are aligned poorly.

The platform benefits, the brands benefit, the parents benefit.

And the parents tell themselves the kids benefit because they make money, but really you're sexualizing your sub-10 years old daughter.

I mean, shame on you.

I don't know.

Am I just an old stick in the mud?

No, it's pageant culture, right?

Like, I mean, what these parents would say before when they had their kids up on stage in these beauty pageants at seven years old in full fave makeup and, you know, sexualizing themselves in dances and stuff is like, listen, this pageant money is going to pay for their college.

And it is girls.

That's what bothers me so much about it.

I think as a woman, there's not really this equivalent for young boy influencers.

There are a lot of young boy influencers, but they're not sexualized in the same way by like masses of women online.

It is these young girls.

And I think that the parents at some level, especially the ones mentioned in these articles, they are aware of that.

And they've decided to make that trade-off for money.

And that is the problem with all of this stuff, as you said.

And the incentive structure, the algorithms, the money, the views culture where people are just paid off views, like it all aligns in a bad way.

Meta, so Facebook, not being very helpful here from what I understand, you can actually get in trouble for blocking too many accounts.

So let's say a mom goes, I don't want these predators following my kid.

And they block everybody everybody who put a creepy eggplant emoji or whatever in, they can actually run into problems with their account.

Why are you blocking so many people?

We're going to throttle your ability to do that.

And it's like, you are going to make it harder for me to block pedos from looking at my daughter on the internet?

What the hell?

And I would imagine that there's got to be long-term damage to their kids' self-worth and certainly from their safety.

And from a law enforcement perspective, for those wondering why we don't just arrest these folks, I mean, it's just a big gray area, right?

Because it's not technically child sexual abuse material or pornographic.

It's just creepy.

It doesn't pass the test.

You would look at that and go, that's normal, but you can't sort of legally go, hey, this photo shouldn't exist.

It's like that photo might be fine in your family photo album.

It's extra creepy when it's on the internet and being commented on.

It's just riding on that, it's towing that line.

Yes.

We have a broader culture, again, that fetishizes youth and women.

We had, I'll never forget, I grew up with like the Olson twins, right?

There was these, the tabloids were running countdowns to when they turned 18.

You have photographers, paparazzi laying on the ground, you know, when like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears walked out of their 18th birthday to take upskirt photos of them.

That's not legal, is it?

I believe it.

I mean, look, the upskirt photos now in 2025 are considered inappropriate, although New York Magazine ran one a couple of years ago.

But that was a big thing in the odds.

And it certainly is a thing now.

Even, do you remember like these celebrities would be getting out of the car as well.

They would try to get these upskirt photos.

Obviously, the women are wearing underwear.

But we still have this culture that sexualizes girls.

Wasn't that a Britney Spears thing or Paris Hilton?

They caught her getting out of the car and it was like

so tacky.

But if you look online, you know, like you, you look at how people talk about women and influencers.

And especially as we're moving towards this, like, I don't even know how to describe it, but it's sort of this red pill culture of fetishizing youth.

This idea that like women lose value the minute they turn 18, that's when they're sort of most valuable and then they lose value up until they turn 30 and then they're over the hill.

All of that is ultimately like deeply pedophilic culture.

It teaches men the younger, the better.

And so then they, you see these men online.

I've seen men arguing, well, yeah, I followed these 13-year-olds, but that's normal.

Back in the medieval times, girls would get married when they're 13 or whatever.

It's delusional.

And their lifespan was maybe till 26 or 35.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jeez.

It's gross.

And so, yeah, I think Instagram, you mentioned, has done a terrible job of this because Instagram doesn't want to do anything that will mitigate engagement.

So if you block too many people or if you try to sort of exert control over your account to have more sort of user control, they don't want you throttling engagement.

They make it harder.

And they say, oh, well, it's to prevent spam.

I think that they have long abdicated user controls in favor of engagement above everything else.

And now for some deals and discounts so good, you won't have to sell your children's photos to perverts on the internet.

We'll be right back.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Taylor Lorenz.

This is the question I think a lot of people are wondering, and we've touched on this a little bit, but are parents complicits?

Are they naive or are they actually trapped?

Because now they have a choice between rationalizing bad behavior and not paying for their kids college and not taking a vacation to Disneyland.

I'm sympathetic to a lot of these, complicit less so, I suppose, but naive, okay, I kind of can see how you could start that way.

Trapped, I can see how that could happen.

I can see you going, wow, we made an extra 100 grand this year because of Julie's dance photos.

And now we got to put stuff that people want.

It's a little weird and there's some weirdos, but it's not the end of the world.

And they don't, again, they don't know where we live, but they do.

And it's going to pay for all of of her college.

And look, all her brothers and sisters can get the medical care that they need or whatever.

They can go to private school in this area that doesn't have good public schools.

I hate to say it, but I'm sort of sympathetic to that.

Like I get really being able to use the money that you're making from this and then figuring out any way possible to keep the gravy train running.

I think there are good parents and bad parents, right?

And like I mentioned, that dad who's like the adventure dad and started recording like the adventures with the kids.

Like I think some of these parents really do go into this being like, I want to be ethical.

Look, I want to take advantage of this influencer world.

Maybe, like you said, some of it is helping paying for the mortgage after the dad lost the job or the mom can't work.

Some of them are in these financial situations and they're trying to do it in a responsible way.

And I think that's fine.

Some of the kids really want to be entertainers.

They sort of grew up.

They really, that's their dream.

And the parents are like, look, we'll try to help you realize that dream.

Sometimes I think they're naive.

I don't know.

I mean, I wrote about a 15-year-old who was sexually assaulted in a content house years ago where the content house, the adult at the content house overseeing the content house was 18, by the way, an 18-year-old YouTuber.

Oh, gosh.

I talked to the parents and I'm like, why would you send your 14-year-old child who eventually turned 15 to live in a content house managed by an 18 year old?

And they're like, well, he wants to be an entertainer.

This is a kid who's an aspiring pop star now, like, and was a popular YouTuber and blew up online.

And the parents are like these nice Midwestern parents that, again, are so ignorant of the internet.

Like parents don't understand these platforms.

so they think okay i want to help my you know i want my child to realize their dream but i would say don't send them to la to do that they can wait four years like but it's hard when you're a parent so i think some well-intentioned people get into it and then they're in too deep but then there's a lot that i think are completely complicit and should be prosecuted right because they do not have the best interests of their child at heart and unfortunately bad parenting is not against the law traumatizing your children you know to an extent is not against the law like embarrassing your children rather but i think a lot more parents just need to go into it with open eyes and be aware, again, of this surveillance infrastructure, where things are going.

Because even if it's not problematic today, I promise you, we are rapidly losing privacy.

And the way things are going is really dark and dystopian.

I would argue that, again, the best thing that you can give your child is actually privacy.

That's really well put.

I think a lot of people don't maybe understand.

how the comments and the DMs and the telegram groups kind of can end up with groomed or exploited kids.

But what red flag should parents recognize before it's too late?

Is there some sort of, I mean, obviously look at the comments that are on our kids' posts.

What else?

Look in their DMs because they're 11 and shouldn't have privacy there.

What are we looking for?

Yes.

Don't let your child be on the internet unsupervised when they're young.

Like you don't want to keep your kid off the internet completely.

I'm very against this idea of banning kids until they're 16 or 18 from getting on social media.

That's the last thing we should do because then they're 18 on social media and they don't know how to navigate these platforms at all.

Right.

So you want to have these experiences where you allow your child to learn about the internet, but learn about the internet in a safe way.

Certainly do not give your child unsupervised access to iPads where they're just consuming content all day.

And talk to them early.

When you see these children online, be like, hey, here's what's happening.

The parent is vlogging this.

Explain the dynamics of the influencer economy to them.

And just be aware.

It's fine.

I think if your child wants to set up a YouTube account, I went to a bunch of these camps.

They're these fast-growing programs for kids aged, I think it's like 10 to 17, where there are summer camps teaching kids how to become YouTubers because this is a really popular career.

And I talk to a lot of parents.

I'm like, why are you sending your 13-year-old to YouTuber camp?

And they're like, listen, I want my kid to grow up.

Maybe Susie wants to start a cooking channel.

We don't want people time stamping when she's licking off the batter or whatever, but we want her to learn video editing and we want her to feel like she has this creative way to express herself.

So set up a private channel.

You can set up unlisted videos.

Those videos can be shared with a small group of friends and family or whatever.

They can learn the video editing skills, but keep it private, right?

Or keep the Instagram account locked.

Don't let them engage in this world unsupervised.

Not to have a surveillance thing, but you do want to surveil your kids when they're young.

And you want to make sure that you have check-ins and that your children can come to you and say, hey, I got a really weird, creepy message.

And know that they're not going to get in trouble or that you aren't going to blame them.

And say, well, why did you post that photo?

But say, listen, there's creeps out here.

And I know that you wanted to share that bikini pic because you felt happy, or you wanted to share your dance video because you felt proud of yourself.

But we want to make sure that we're watching out for these bad people.

This is nothing new.

I remember when I was young, my parents resisted getting me a modem for my computer, which is for people who don't know what that is, that allows you to connect to the internet using the phone.

They didn't want me to have that because our family friend who also had a computer and a modem wouldn't let his kids use the modem.

And the reason was there are pedos online on i think it was like aol or compu serve or whatever it was by prodigy these super old online services where you could join a chat room and it's like there's pedophiles in there and people who've listened to the show for a while have heard this story a million times but i mean i even helped catch pedophiles early in the game on aol in the 90s and had a few guys get arrested by the fbi as a result because they were looking for young teenage girls to take photographs of because they were a photographer.

I mean, it was really creepy and the grooming was real.

Now it seems like it's probably more pervasive because back then, nobody knew what this imaginary 14-year-old girl looked like.

They didn't realize they were chatting with me who was printing out the transcripts and sending the facts in to the FBI.

Now they know the girl is real.

They can figure out using weird geo-guessing, which is where you use like things in videos and photos to find out where someone lives because you see a business and a street name or.

something like that, or it's next to another business and you can do really creepy stuff.

Like, all right, in the background of this was a hobby lobby.

And then they said they went to Home Depot.

So we need a list of all of the plazas in California that have a hobby lobby and a Home Depot in the same place.

Okay, we found three.

Let's look at Google Street View and find out what each of these looks like.

Okay, I think we found the one where they went.

Huh, that means they must live within a few miles of this place.

Let's look at their house.

Let's look at other places and geolocate them.

And that's why you and I were sort of joking before, they always know where you live.

Cause if somebody's willing to put that kind of time in there, it's really actually not hard to do that.

One of my friends is like, there's a website, I think it's called GeoGuesser, and you guess where things are.

He's like top rated single digit rank and geo guesser, big nerd, as you might imagine.

But like, it's very easy to find out where something is pretty much anywhere in the world if you know what clues to look for in photos and videos.

It's really scary, actually.

I also just want to say something that I think is actually a bigger problem.

I know parents always obsess over the creepiness and the pedophiles and all that.

Yes, that is something that I think like tugs at parents' heartstrings.

But there's something that I think is actually a bigger reason, I guess, like a bigger problem with this whole like child influencer industry.

And that is the fact that young people don't have their identity formed yet.

Young people are exploring who they are.

They're trying to learn who they are.

They're trying to try on different hats.

Like we were both millennials, I think, or like elder millennials.

Maybe we had like a goth phase and then we became a cheerleader.

And then we like, you know, we all like, we had the luxury of exploring.

And it wasn't filmed, thank God.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Even if you have a child that wants to sort of become a certain influencer, right?

I talked to this one kid who had, or Timothy Chalamet famously had like a gaming channel when he was young.

That's funny.

One kid was like doing skateboarding videos and I was talking to their dad and they were like, that was a sort of more private account.

And he was saying like, look, I don't think my kid's going to like this forever.

You want to create spaces for privacy because you want kids to be able to explore their identity and not feel like they have to rebrand themselves.

And something I've heard from a lot of kids over the years.

especially child influencers that I've interviewed is like, listen, I was really into this when I started it.

I sort of cultivated this brand online and now I'm trying to explore other interests or I'm trying to grow and maybe I'm going in a different way.

And you have this audience pressure that's like, no, where's your XYZ videos?

Or why are you doing this?

Or why have you changed your mind on this stuff?

Some of these kids are, they're trying to become political influencers, you know, at like age 16.

And your politics, you don't even know about the world when you're 16.

Your politics are going to evolve, but the incentive structure is there to lock you in.

And so kids end up with a lot of psychological damage because they can't really evolve and explore themselves.

And they feel very beholden, especially when the parent is putting so much online.

They can't explore their own identity and express their own identity because it's been written for them and because now there's all this incentive around it.

So I think, again, you just want to give your kid privacy so that they can have that goth phase in peace and it hasn't been documented, right?

Or they can sort of have and that they don't have to sort of like live with that online and feel that pressure to conform to this identity.

And kids want to explore their identity through the internet.

So I think you don't have to keep them offline, but try to let them do it in private.

Did you have a goth phase?

Is that what you're trying to tell everyone right now?

I had so many phases.

I certainly had the emo phase with like the side bangs.

And like, you know, I just, I think like the goth thing is so funny because I see a lot of kids, it's like used against them later with like, oh, and this was you.

And you're, you know, now it's been a big thing too, where I talked to one, she's an influencer in college now, but she had a like a really hardcore Republican phase.

She grew up really conservative and it's kind of used against her.

She now she does reproductive justice and she actually talks about like, hey, I had this Republican phase, but it's kind of used to discredit her.

And it's kind kind of used as, and it's like, gosh, we all evolve, but because the way the internet is where it's like, well, here's the receipts on, you know, what you said when you were 15.

I think she wishes that that wasn't out there, right?

That her life wasn't documented and that she wasn't spouting off about politics or whatever or having controversies when you're young, which can then jeopardize your job prospects.

Cause

this is all happening now where you have jobs and I've talked to employers who are like, well, they're 22, they're promising, but they have kind of a weird internet history.

And now we have facial recognition and AI AI that can sort of flag these things.

Just keep it off the internet.

Just give your child privacy.

Yeah, growing up as a brand definitely would mess with your self-worth, your boundaries, your sense of identity.

I also worry, and this is an article you can do in five or 10 years, I suppose, but I wonder what the stats are going to be like on child influencers transitioning into platforms like OnlyFans, like that Lil Tay you mentioned, because early exposure.

maybe somehow normalizes sexualized attention in an unhealthy way for a lot of these little girls.

And they just want money.

They have been taught to value money by our culture, by society, where like even Danielle Bergoli, the cash me outside girl who got famous as well when she was a child, she talks about, she's like, listen, she was actually abused by older men when she was a teen.

And she was like, nobody cared about me.

And so I thought, listen, if men are going to sexualize me and abuse me, and that's what culture is going to reward, I might as well profit off it.

And I would say, rather than getting mad at these girls, because there's so much hate directed at them, let's fix this culture of obsessing about young girls.

Like, let's fix this pedophilic culture where men are telling women that they age out when they're 30 and that their value only comes from youth.

That is what is feeding this.

That is what is feeding these, you know, this market.

We should fix that rather than villainize these, you know, 19-year-olds that have likely been abused or gone through trauma themselves.

I remember the Cash Me Outside girl, and I remember a lot of my friends who were parents at the time.

I was, this is pre-kids for me, way pre-kids.

I remember being like, oh my God, have you seen this?

And they're like, yeah, as a parent, that's horrifying.

Something is wrong in her home.

And I was like, oh, yeah, good point.

I didn't really think about that.

And my friend, who's a professor and he had kids really early, he said when that video was going around, start the countdown to when she does some kind of porn.

And I was like, what are you talking about?

And he's like, trust me.

And here we are.

She's like number one on OnlyFans the day she turned 18.

And I've sent that to him.

I was like, do you remember saying that she would be in porn?

And he's like, no, but I guess I was right.

He really called it because she clearly was not treated well by whoever whoever it was and her stepdad or whatever.

Well, I can't remember exactly the story, but yeah, she had this traumatic childhood.

And it was really easy for all of us to laugh at her and be like, what shitty parents.

And of course, there was definitely some shitty parenting happening there or she wouldn't have made it to Dr.

Phil in the first place.

But it's really, really sad to see this child actors, right, on set.

They've got protections.

They've got enforcement.

You know, we were looking at.

I can't remember what his name was.

What you talking about, Willis, remember that guy?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And you had Webster and stuff, although I think he had a disease where he was actually really an adult.

He looked like a kid.

But none of that exists when mom and dad are sharing, as you think, coined it.

They're filming you talking about your first period sponsored by a tampon company.

And they argue, you know, I'm just filming the kid's life, but it's so much more involved in this.

This documentary that I saw that you were in that reminded me to reach out to you.

I already forgot what it was called, but it was about kid influencers.

Bad influence.

Bad influence, yes.

And you killed it on there.

And the workday for those kids was like 15 hours hours because they had to film, their whole squad or whatever had to film one to two videos per day.

And I don't know what a video sketching filming thing is like, but if I had to prepare two podcasts per day or even one per day, I would lose my freaking mind.

It would be very hard, even with my whole team.

I couldn't do it.

I would burn out.

And these are kids.

They're supposed to spend a lot of time in school.

And also, I don't know, mindlessly watching SpongeBob to relax because they're developing.

And they don't have any of that.

They don't have any of the protections that those kids have.

They're on all the time.

And I got to wonder what being on and performing all the time does to a kid's sense of self, to your earlier point.

Yeah, we do have the Coogan Act.

So there are some protections if those kids are sort of in a more professionalized setting.

It has all these laws around like child entertainers, basically.

And California has stronger protections.

I mean, in that case, the Piper Rock Hell case, too, it's these kids that are in these programs or these content houses and things where there's not a lot of oversight.

Or the oversight, again, is an 18-year-old YouTuber who's technically technically an adult, but I would argue should not be in charge of a bunch of young people,

younger people, I guess.

So unfortunately, what we're seeing now, though, Jordan, is this reaction where people are rightfully horrified by these systems, but they're backing these horrible, dangerous laws that absolutely will not do what they're claiming to do.

And so you're seeing these things.

You'll read these headlines.

And I made a big YouTube video, wrote 7,000 word.

takedown of this recent Utah law that's like, we're passing a law to protect child influencers.

And you see this a lot of states put forward, we're passing these laws to protect child influencers.

Well, you read the law and the law does not protect child influencers at all.

In fact, according to a lot of child endangerment experts, these laws will further endanger child influencers and make it even harder to prosecute cases of child abuse.

So it's very frustrating.

It's very frustrating because people actually do want to do something about this.

We can talk about what can actually be done.

But we have to make sure that we are not passing really dangerous, bad, essentially censorship laws that are going to further endanger kids, which is what we're seeing now.

We're seeing these states.

And you know, what's crazy too is I called the Utah lawmaker who co-sponsored this bill.

I said, you know, can you explain all these horrible red flags that are in this bill that you passed?

He said, I didn't read the bill.

I don't know if he said, I didn't read it.

He said, I don't know what's in the bill.

Call a lawyer and they can explain it to you.

I also interviewed two people that testified for the bill.

And I said, guys, what about all this horrible stuff that's in this bill that people say actually is going to endanger the children more?

They said, oh, well, we don't really know about that stuff.

We didn't really read the bill very much.

I'm like, you testified for the bill to be passed.

Right.

You testified for this law and you're saying you don't know what's in it.

So we are in this horrible situation.

Yeah.

So don't just get on board because you see a headline saying, oh, we need to pass a law.

What's worse than no law is a bad law.

That

we don't want that, but we do need more transparency.

And I would say the things we can do is put pressure on these brands.

Look at these brands.

When we see the advertising on these channels, why are these brands incentivizing this?

You know, like, why is this company monetizing a girl's period?

I think that they should receive some letters, right?

And also the platforms themselves.

Yeah.

The platforms themselves know when this stuff is happening.

And I think that we need to allow for more them to allow more user controls and anonymity and things like that.

And we need to fix this broader culture of pedophilia that we have in society.

I don't know how you do that.

I mean, that's because it's so

people don't even want to talk about it, let alone do they have good ideas on how to fix it.

I know we're running out of time, but how do you enforce rules and boundaries on a kid who has more money than a grown up and thus, you know, an unusual level of autonomy?

It's got to be pretty hard to tell your kid.

My parents used to say stuff to me when I was being a little shit, like, if you want to do this, then you move out and you get your own place.

And it was like, oh, okay, I guess I can't do that.

But what happens when you say that to a kid who has a million dollars in cash in his savings account?

And he's like, great, I would love to move out and get my own place.

And then, yes, I will jump off the roof into a pool and I will drink in my own private property and I will light things on fire and blow things up because I can afford to do that because I have more money than you, Dad, even though you're a lawyer or something, right?

Because they are killing it and the threats are a little bit more empty.

And yes, you have parental authority, but like kind of if they really wanted to not do that with you, you couldn't really stop them.

That's scary.

Jordan, what's really scary is I talked to, I did a story a couple years ago about this talent manager and I was talking to parents of teenagers and they said that the talent manager, this Los Angeles talent person, had reached out to the teens and encouraged the teens to emancipate themselves,

sending the messages saying, hey, your parents are holding you back.

Move to LA can make you millions.

These parents are holding you back and I'll make you money.

So preying on these kids as a parent, I mean, horrifying.

That's terrible.

So I think here's the thing, the power dynamics are going to be messed up.

It's so hard to be a parent of a teen.

I'm empathetic to that.

You have to build this relationship of trust with your child early and you have to have an open door policy, right?

Where you allow them to engage in the internet.

Don't say no internet.

That's never going to work.

You cannot have that world.

These kids will find a way to go on the internet wherever, however they can.

I do work in prison sometimes.

Those guys have internet.

So your kid who's not in a maximum security facility is going to figure out a way to get internet.

But I think it's about educating themselves and educating them about the systems of incentives that say, listen, These people are going to promise you the world, but look at XYZ.

Read this testimony from Ruby Frankie's daughter or whatever, or look at how some of these kids turn out or look at this.

And say, if you want to be in an influencer world, we're not opposed to that, but let's access it in a smart way.

Let's be sure that you preserve your privacy.

And again, educate them on this surveillance infrastructure that's being built because facial recognition is becoming the norm.

So say, you know, hey, you're 15, you want to put yourself out there.

Guess what?

An employer is going to be able to look and.

AI analyze every single thing that you're ever going to post.

Do you really want to take that risk?

And a lot of kids, again, they have no brain cells.

So they're like, sure, sure.

You know, I don't care.

It doesn't matter.

I'm going to be famous on YouTube and I won't need a real job.

So I don't care what employers are looking at.

I mean, that's what they would say.

And 99% of people don't succeed.

So I think it's about educating them, exposing them to those stories.

There's plenty of testimonies from influencers that talk about the fact that, like, look, this is a 1% market.

You're hearing about these 1% stories.

You're not seeing all the failed attempts.

And experiment, make your YouTube channel, make it private, but teach your kids to value privacy and respect privacy and teach your young girls to value themselves outside of how they look and value themselves for who they are, not because they're getting validation from men or validation online, because that is what the culture teaches them.

And you're right, we're not going to fix it overnight, but I do think it's important to call that out.

And unfortunately, like these trad wife influencers, like they're telling these women too, right?

Your value is being a mother at home.

Your value is being a young wife and having kids as young as possible.

We need to teach girls that there are other ways to value yourself that are not just your body and how young you are.

Taylor Lorenz, thank you very much.

Enlightening, a little bit scary,

appropriate level of troubling.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

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Super interesting stuff.

Taylor's great friend of the show for a while.

We didn't touch touch as much on content houses.

Essentially, there's a bunch of influencers living together, often run by a talent manager.

Some of these can be legit-ish, but a lot of it can be sort of like a sweatshop.

Long hours, talent managers basically squeezing you for everything you're worth.

They sell ads.

Maybe they pay you, but they also take out your rent, maybe some room and board.

That's not necessarily transparent.

There's no parents.

What rights do you have?

Who's parenting you?

Are you being parented and managed by a boss who gets a cut of revenue?

That doesn't seem very ideal for a kid.

It can be a very predatory environment.

I've seen exposés on this where the bills in the house go unpaid.

Kids are trapped.

They're evicted.

Maybe there's no food.

Maybe they turn off the water.

Really big influencers.

Surprise, surprise, people report never getting paid.

It can be just a huge mess.

And man, I got to say, some of these influencer families are weird AF.

There's like 11 kids and a creepy, wifey, kind of Christian nationalist vibe kind of thing going on.

A little bit of side eye, I would give these families some of the time.

Some of this stuff is outright weird.

And when it's not a sweatshop, sometimes these environments are just low-key, abusive, or maybe not low-key at all.

All things Taylor Lorenz will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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If you know somebody who's interested in becoming an influencer, has a child influencer, maybe they're already doing this, definitely share this episode with them.

In fact, if they're skeptical of the whole thing, share this episode with them.

They'll know that they were on the right track.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time.

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