To Be Unknown

family vloggers, privacy, and arthur

Trigger Warning: This post contains references to abuse.

I’ve never fully understood why some kids weren’t allowed to watch Arthur growing up. Sure, D.W. can be a brat, but she was never praised for her actions, and I’ve always found that the episodes contained solid lessons for kids.

One episode came to mind recently. The episode titled “Revenge of the Chip” is the second part of a two-part episode—the first dealing with D.W., who believes she has been poisoned after eating a green potato chip. This belief came from a joke that Arthur and Buster pulled on her after she ate their chips and refused to fess up.

D.W., believing she is going to die, decides to live her life to the fullest and starts being kinder to others, including her brother. Arthur becomes suspicious of D.W.’s change in behaviour and realizes it is because of the lie he told her. Arthur eventually tells D.W. it was a lie, and the Read family laughs over D.W.’s naivety.

In the second part, everyone around town has been hearing about D.W.’s confusion over the chip and laughs at her innocence. The story even ends up in the town’s newspaper, leaving D.W. completely embarrassed and determined to track down who is spreading this story around town.

In a scene that haunted me as a child, it is revealed that D.W.’s mother is the one that has been telling this story to everyone. D.W. walks in on her mom while she is on the phone laughing about D.W., and she turns into a big pair of lips talking faster and faster about who else she is going to tell. D.W., rightly upset, breaks down in tears and begs her mom not to tell anyone else.

I remember watching this episode as a child and feeling completely betrayed along with D.W. over this reveal. It was her own mother who was sharing this embarrassing moment with everyone around town. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if it was my mother who was going around telling her friends all of my embarrassing moments.

This moment came to mind as I was reading Shari Franke’s memoir The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom. As a quick recap for those who don’t know, Shari is the eldest daughter of Ruby Franke, a “Mom-Fluencer” and Family Vlogger who ran a YouTube channel called “8 Passengers” with millions of subscribers from 2015 to around 2021. In 2023, Ruby Franke was arrested alongside her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, for aggravated child abuse after one of her sons fled to a neighbour’s house, malnourished and with obvious signs of abuse, looking for help. Later, in 2024, Franke and Hildebrandt pled guilty to these charges and were sentenced to prison.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here (and, if it’s something you can handle, I recommend giving the book a read), but Shari’s memoir recounts her upbringing in the Franke home, detailing some of the abuse and neglect that she and her siblings experienced at the hand of her mother.

One of Shari’s main arguments, and something she continues to fight for, is the lack of privacy that she and her siblings experienced when her mom started posting YouTube videos about their life.

Shari writes:

We never chose to be internet celebrities. But that made no difference—soon, our lives now revolved around nonstop content creation—whether we liked it or not. Birthdays, barbecues, even lazy Sunday afternoons—no moment was too mundane to escape documentation…But for me, a twelve year old girl, this constant surveillance was excruciating. All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded. But my mother was omnipresent, her phone an extension of her arm, directing us like a Hollywood producer: ‘Do this, do that, Shari— we’re filming!’(Franke, pg 46-47)

Later in the book, Shari recounts a specific moment when Ruby asked if she could wax Shari’s eyebrows for a YouTube video, even offering her $100 if she accepted. However, it didn’t turn out well.

Ruby had waxed off half my left eyebrow, leaving a sharp ninety-degree angle that made me look like I was perpetually shocked by my own reflection…I was mortified, but of course, Ruby kept the camera rolling, zooming in on my face like she was documenting a rare species of uni-browed teen in its natural habitat. The money shot, indeed…Sure enough, the video titled ‘SHARI, I’M SO SORRY!!’ with a thumbnail of me mid-ugly cry racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Wonderful, I thought. I always wanted to be famous for my crazy eyebrows.” (Franke, pg 70)

This moment felt a bit like what that scene in Arthur was depicting: a mom sharing her daughter’s embarrassment. Except this time, it wasn’t just some family friends, it was the whole internet.

It’s a horrifying story, the Franke’s, and I can’t help but feel grateful that, amidst all the internet trends and fads, I have never had vulnerable, embarrassing, or private moments shared online without my knowledge and consent. But the same can not be said for everyone.

Family vlogging—the practice of creating daily/weekly video blogs of your family’s routines and outings—grew in popularity in the early 2010s as YouTube grew as a social media platform. Thousands of parents began documenting their lives for millions to see without a great understanding of what this exposure would mean for their family life and their children. As the years have passed, more vocabulary and awareness of the consequences of this online presence arose and there’s been a shift in the audience’s perspective of these channels. Still, family vlogging and “Mom-fluencers” (which, in case it’s not clear, are influencers who build a platform on being a mom and sharing their family/lifestyle) remain popular and mostly unregulated, something that Shari Franke wants to change.

Privacy, in the digital age, is something that is equally safeguarded and thrown to the wind. We are so on top of changing our passwords, blurring out street numbers and license plates, and monitoring what media children are consuming, yet we can post flippantly about where we are, who we are dating, where we are travelling, and more. Influencers create house tours with precise layouts of their homes, which are accessible online. They share footage of them dropping their kids off at school with identifiable landmarks in the background. They share stories of their kids wetting the bed, getting sick at school, saying something silly. Instead of valuing privacy and ensuring their family was safe from internet predators, these influencers bow to the god of content creation.

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There was a family vlogging channel I used to watch when I was younger. When the parents were having their fifth kid, they documented the moment he was born. He became known as the internet’s first child, one whose life was documented as soon as he took his first breath. He was YouTube’s very own Truman.

In the age of social media, privacy has become a privilege, not a right.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up in a family that is well-known online. To have had my upbringing documented and uploaded for millions to see. To constantly have a camera in my face. (Also, it doesn’t even have to be for millions of followers. I think about local politicians who have their private lives critiqued and spread across the internet for people to see.)

Slowly, children of influencer/Youtuber parents have been speaking out about their childhoods and the effects that this practice and lifestyle have had on their lives and their mental health. There has also been a move among people who grew up on the internet to move away from sharing on social media, to trade possible fame and notoriety for privacy and simplicity.

Shari, reflecting on how greedy the public was when the news broke about her mom’s arrest and conviction, writes:

How quickly have we, as a society, become numb to the struggles of others, our capacity for compassion eroded by the sheer volume of human drama we’re exposed to daily? We were just characters in a soap opera now, except the drama was real and the consequences permanent. Our grief had been reduced to a mere commodity, packaged and sold, consumed and discarded…I knew I had to make a stand, somehow. Part of that would be saying no to the world’s desire for me to talk about my siblings, anywhere. Even in the pages of my own book. It is up to my brothers and sisters if they wish to share their story one day. But I’d be no better than Ruby if I detailed their experiences without their consent. They deserve to be given back the choice that had been stolen from them for so long.

I admit, I too fall into the habit of eagerly reading the dramatic and juicy details of someone’s private life that has been put on display. As a fan of Taylor Swift, it’s so easy to want to know everything about her life, her relationships, her down time. As much as I want my life to be private, the idea of respecting the privacy of celebrities feels a bit easier to move past.

I’ve said to some people in my life that I have no desire to be famous or “known” online. This hope is one that often conflicts with my dream of being a published author and writing a book one day. And, in the age of social media, sometimes it doesn’t matter what you want—virality can be just around the corner.

Family vloggers and influencers are just one side of the story of consent and privacy. The other is how it has become socially acceptable to film/photograph people just doing their own thing and posting it online.

One prime example of this is Alex Lee, or “Alex from Target”, a young cashier who went viral back in 2014 after a Twitter user took a picture of him while he was bagging her groceries and posted him online.

The original “Alex from Target” image that went viral in 2014.

Lizzie Hyman, from People.com, writes, “Lee, who went from 15 Twitter followers to 650,000 in a week — along with a whopping 2 million Instagram followers — was quickly contacted by Ellen DeGeneres’ team, hoping to get the new Internet sensation on her show.”

Lee was not very active on social media, and had no desire to “capitalize” off of the internet fame that was thrust upon him after he went viral. Hyman continues, “As someone who wasn’t well-versed in the entertainment industry, Lee says he worked with a management team and did a few brand deals but ended up deleting his Twitter altogether. Lee started to feel anxious about posting on social media, but also had pressure from those around him to keep his momentum going.”

In his latest update with People Magazine, he has cut social media out completely and works a regular job for UPS.

Alex Lee isn’t the only example. Nowadays, there are countless videos posted every day of people just going about their lives. Whether it be videos of people on the subway, people working out at the gym, or doorbell camera footage, there are opportunities to be videoed or photographed at every turn. This, combined with social media platforms like TikTok where virality is more common, means that a regular could be in the depths of a 9-5 one day and could score a podcast deal Spotify the next.

In fact, I know someone who became a meme back in the earlier internet days, having had an image of her in grade 8 at her school’s science fair go semi-viral. My friend, who had two broken arms at the time, presented a project on water towers at her school. However, the internet decided to use some Photoshop magic and build off of the joke of her having two broken arms. The result (shared with my friend’s permission) became a viral internet image.

The original image with the original project title

The edited image with the joke project title

My friend found out about this meme in her second year of university after it had been posted online. It started getting shared around and eventually was posted on an account with millions of followers. For a while, she was being sent the meme from people she knew who had come across it as they roamed the internet.

Generally, she had fun with it and thought the joke was funny. However, the internet always has to ruin a good thing, and when other edited images, these ones less innocent and appropriate, started floating around, it eventually had to be reported to the police.

So, while you could be doing all you can to protect your privacy, to live a life “off-line”, sometimes it doesn’t matter—the internet might have a different idea.

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To call back to my earlier comment about not wanting to be “known” online but wanting to write a book one day, the story of Elena Ferrante comes to mind. Ferrante is the pseudonym of an Italian novelist who is most known for her “Neapolitan Novels”, a set of four books that tracks the friendship of two women throughout their lives.

Since 1992, Ferrante has kept her true identity a secret as an effort to maintain her privacy. However, people wouldn’t let her be. Instead, an investigative reporter went to extreme lengths to uncover Ferrante’s true identity, looking at real estate documents and royalty payments that he believed would lead to the person behind the pseudonym. Still, her identity has remained private even though people continue to theorize over who she is.

Stories like this leave me feeling unsure and hopeless about the future of the Internet. In some cases, we are making strides and recognizing how earlier practices and trends were harmful. But in other cases, we are only perpetuating other harmful ideas for the sake of views, likes, brand deals, and potential notoriety.

I’m not sure what I want from the internet and social media platforms moving forward. In some ways, they have been how I connect with friends, find new hobbies and inspiration, share my work, and engage with people and stories from around the world. And yet, on the other, it is becoming a place that is more negative, hateful, and harder to be present on than ever before.

But one thing I know for sure is this: my head will never turn into a pair of big lips that share private details of my family’s life on the internet for anyone to see.