Just a year after the allegation-packed exposé Quiet on Set ruined your fantasy of happy child actors on the Nickelodeon lot, a new Netflix series is ready to explain how the youngest YouTubers are miserable too. The new series Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing lays bare the unregulated world of underage YouTube stars, using the controversial case of now-17-year-old Piper Rockelle and her mother, Tiffany Smith, as a lens for the entire industry. “Our goal in this was to expose the real human cost behind this glossy façade of internet fame,” codirector Kief Davidson says. “If we don’t address these issues now, other kids are going to be taken advantage of in the future.”
Born in 2007, Rockelle (who was born Piper Rockelle Smith) shot to fame at age nine via videos produced and posted to YouTube by her mom. By 2017, her online content had transitioned from the standard “little-kid day in the life” stuff to more clearly staged and scripted videos involving a group of youngsters referred to as the Squad, who acted out scenarios tweaked for maximum clicks. Though slickly packaged, the videos are corny and a little clunky, giving them a DIY and vaguely authentic feel—like the home movies many of us made with friends during the long days of summer.
But unlike our home movies, Rockelle and the Squad’s short films were big business. At its peak, Rockelle’s videos of her and her friends’ filmed pranks, challenges, and scripted and staged romantic content (known as “crush,” “kiss,” or “boyfriend” videos) brought in an estimated half a million dollars per month, Bad Influence claims.
But to get there, a mother of a Squad member claims, the production was run like a cult. Angela Sharbino, the mother of former Squad member Sawyer Sharbino, alleges in Bad Influence that Smith demanded complete loyalty from their child charges, penalized them for dissent, and ostracized those who pushed back or left the group. Sawyer was one of nearly a dozen plaintiffs in a 2022 lawsuit brought by former Squad members against Smith and her boyfriend Hunter Hill that claimed Smith had created “an emotionally, physically and sometimes sexually abusive environment,” much of which is detailed in the series.
Davidson agrees with Angela’s assessment. “The minute we started talking with the families and they started telling us their stories, what was really happening behind the scenes was a cult,” he says. “There’s always that question: How could you not recognize this?” It’s the same question raised by Quiet on Set, and by Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke—another docuseries involving powerful adults who allegedly exploited children for the sake of entertainment. In both of them, we also see parents who claim they didn’t realize what was allegedly happening to their children.
“I think everyone’s a little different, and there’s different reasoning. But I think at the core they wanted their kids to be happy, and couldn’t see what was going on right in front of their faces,” Davidson says of Bad Influence’s adults. According to a parent of a Squad member who appears in Bad Influence, kids were working until 2 a.m. without breaks for meals.
Other problematic situations appeared to happen outside of Squad parents’ view. According to Bad Influence, parents didn’t know what was going on while their kids were filming social media content. Much of that content involved romantic scenarios or physical contact, with the lawsuit alleging that Squad members were instructed to touch and kiss other members for ongoing “crush” content.
Bad Influence codirector Jenna Rosher says that Squad parents initially trusted Smith and let her run the show—and that the children didn’t always speak up when things started to feel wrong. “The kids didn’t want to leave their friends. I think they later would say to themselves, ‘Yeah, that was kind of weird, but at the time, I didn’t want to leave the group because it was fun and it was the only group of friends I had,’” Rosher says. “They just couldn’t put words to the things that they were witnessing.”
Some of those claims formed the basis of their lawsuit, which was settled in October for $1.85 million. The settlement did not include an admission of guilt, and Smith and Hill deny the allegations made against them. Via a written statement sent to Vanity Fair by attorney Ken Ingber, Smith says, “Obviously, we didn’t do anything that was alleged. As I’ve said before, money is a powerful motivator for certain personalities—and now that includes Netflix.”
While content starring kids like the Squad is a relatively recent invention, Rosher says the problem at its center is as old as the entertainment industry itself. Rosher is a descendant of child actor Joan Marsh, who rose to fame in the silent film era. Protections for actors were rare back then, and kids on set were essentially treated as small adults. The Coogan Law, as well as other child-specific on-set labor regulations, has made lives for minors on Hollywood sets safer than they were (though, as suggested by Quiet on Set, the system remains imperfect).
“I can only imagine what [Marsh] was exposed to back in the day. Sadly, [it was probably] similar to this industry now,” Rosher says of young online content creators.
Neither Rosher nor Davidson have much hope that platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram will step in to regulate how content-creating kids are treated. “We reached out to YouTube…all of them. And not unexpectedly, there was no response, no comment. So I think they know what the problem is, and they either don’t know how to fix it, or they don’t want to fix it,” Davidson says. (Vanity Fair has reached out to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram for comment.)
So as opposed to trying to solve the entire problem, the filmmakers focused on one person they hope they can still reach: Piper Rockelle. Over the course of Bad Influence’s three episodes, the tone goes from tween drama to cult narrative to deeply troubling claims of child sexualization, but its approach toward Rockelle remains the same.
“It’s really important for the audience to know that Piper is the victim here,” Davidson says. “The issues we expose—child exploitation, the lack of these protections, the dangers that these influencers have—are happening in real time, and Piper’s an extreme example of this.”
Rockelle, however, appears to disagree. In a written statement to Vanity Fair that was also sent by Ingber, she says this: “The Netflix thing makes me angry…because they know the claims were all fake. My mom didn’t do anything they said. I’ll stand behind her forever. Because if it wasn’t for my mom and my family, I’m not sure how I’d get through this.”
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