Hopecore and Kidfluencers
after school weekend edition
Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition, a weekly trend debrief for paid subscribers.💫
I opened my eyes on Saturday morning and started scrolling — as I always do; gotta keep that screentime up — and the first headline I came across was this one:
Nothing like reading about parent- and platform-enabled pedophilia before rubbing the sleep out of your eyes.
Many of us are aware that parents have been managing Instagram accounts for their underage daughters, but the New York Times analyzed 2.1 million Instagram posts and interviewed over 100 people for this story, revealing just how deeply both platforms and parents are complicit in this. Their sample of 5,000 mom-run accounts ranges “from dancers whose mothers diligently cull men from the ranks of followers, to girls in skimpy bikinis whose parents actively encourage male admirers and sell them special photo sets.”
The influencer economy on Instagram is an extremely lucrative business for children (and, more specifically, their parents), with many kids earning six-figure incomes. Once parents get used to the income, it’s hard to turn it off. This quote from an underage influencer’s mother made my jaw drop:
“I really don’t want my child exploited on the internet,” said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia. “But she’s been doing this so long now,” she said. “Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?”
Social media has completely reshaped childhood, especially for girls, and has encouraged parents to commodify their children’s images for financial gain. We’re only beginning to see the long-term impact. This quote is also from Kaelyn, the mother mentioned above:
“She’s written herself off and decided that the only way she’s going to have a future is to make a mint on OnlyFans,” she said, referring to a website that allows users to sell adult content to subscribers. “She has way more than that to offer.”
Her daughter is 17.
But it’s not just the parents who are looking the other way for financial gain. It’s the brands, too.
Dean Stockton, the founder of Original Hippie, a clothing company that features young girls wearing its brand on its Instagram account, told the Times reporters that he initially tried deleting the male followers, but “now sees them as a way to grow the account and give it a wider audience because the platform rewards large followings.”
He added, “The Bible says, ‘The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous’…So sometimes you got to use the things of this world to get you to where you need to be, as long as it’s not harming anybody.”
All of this is quite distressing — the inclusion of a Bible quote in a story about social media pedophilia says a lot about a lot, I think — especially taken alongside an NBC News report published this week with this headline:
Koti and Haven Garza, 7-year-old twins who “have half a mouthful of baby teeth” and “can hardly pronounce the word ‘influencer’” but regularly “share their skin care routines and fit checks to 4.8 million followers on TikTok” — are part of a new wave of Gen Alpha influencers who are creating content on parent-run accounts.
Two quotes from the story stood out to me. First:
“They love it,” Adrea Garza said of the twins’ online content creation. “They think it’s so cool that people know who they are and want to take a picture with them wherever we go.”
Of course, they think it’s “so cool.” They are seven.
And:
Mark McCrindle, the social researcher and demographer who coined the terminology “Gen Alpha,” said the world is seeing the first “global experiment” on what happens when a whole generation of kids is socialized in a digital-first world.
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These two stories are not about the same thing, exactly, but also they very much are.
It’s not like we’re in completely uncharted territory when it comes to child stars. Ryan Kaji, known to his fans as Ryan's World, is probably the first very famous underage influencer. He began filming videos in 2015 at age 7 — same age as the Garza twins —and now has more than 30 million YouTube subscribers. He’s made $27 million, according to Forbes.
But he’s still only 12, so it’s too early to say how the internet fame at such a young age has impacted him (beyond making him really, really rich).
For more historical context, we can look to the modern-day kidfluencer’s predecessor: The Disney child star. Many of them have had a pretty tough go at adulthood, but not all — Bridgit Mendler, for instance, just raised $6M from Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz for her space startup.
But childhood Disney stardom is very different than posing in a skimpy bikini as a third grader to post on social media and then having your parents sell that bikini to a man on the internet.
It looks like legislation will be passed soon to protect young influencers, and I sure hope so!
The brands and the platforms and the parents are all making a lot of money from this child influencer industry. They all know it’s wrong on some level, so they’re all placing blame on everyone except themselves for not doing more. But it’s the kids that are going to have to bear the burden. We, of course, don’t know what that will look like, but the 17-year-old former child influencer from the Times story who believes her future is limited to OnlyFans is an indicator of what’s to come.
Today we’re talking about:
Cowboycore
“Ultimate girl uniform”
The pedal pusher resurgence
The sneaker era is over
Sad hamster
No borax, no glue
Offshore oil rig influencer trips
When your card declines at therapy
The new cool Gen Z pose
Adam Faze to the rescue
Pulse squats girl
Plus everything else that happened this week in youth culture and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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