The Controversy Behind YouTube Families
You may be familiar of the phenomenon that is family vlogging on YouTube. Family channels such as the 8 Passengers, Norris Nuts, and The LaBrant Fam have become YouTube royalty over the years. Little do people understand the amount of exploitation and capitalization off of children that happens in the industry.
The main attraction of family channels are the children. While the parents’ goal of creating content is to film their daily lives, the children are simply being exploited for a paycheck and maybe some brand deals. From the start of their lives, most of their actions are filmed and uploaded for the world to see, preventing them from ever being able to live a normal life without remembrance of their past actions.
A recent documentary titled, Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke highlighted the dark happenings behind the once beloved family: 8 Passengers. The channel would commonly show their day-to-day doings with their 6 children. Eventually fame got to the head of channel keeper Ruby Franke, who started to believe that she was put on earth to spread the word of God through her YouTube Videos. This initially sparked talks of controversy within the family vloggers community, with former 8 Passengers member Shari Franke advocating for the abolishment of child exploitation.
I can see the attraction to these videos, the Pinterest-board life in family form. Although, the public must accept that these families are not healthy content to be fixated on. YouTube was made for viewer entertainment, not child exploitation.
