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You learn something new every day, and sometimes you very much wish that you hadn’t. The online world of child influencers was a mystery to many of us and Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing will make us wish that it had stayed that way. Yet there are themes here, in this three-part Netflix documentary, that are as old as humanity itself.
Chief among them is the exploitation of children by their parents. And, almost as old, the grisly sight of the civil and commercial authorities turning a blind eye to exploitation of children by their parents on the grounds that the kids don’t complain, or sue or, indeed, vote. Piper Rockelle was a cute little girl from the US state of Georgia whose mother entered her for beauty pageants.
Piper’s mother, Tiffany Smith, became her manager, or momager, as the young people say. Smith seemed to be a bit of an online genius. In 2017, she and Piper, who was 10, moved to Los Angeles, the centre of the kidfluencer industry.
On YouTube, Piper looked like she was just goofing around, messing about, doing kid things. She got millions of views. Smith expanded the group of children around Piper, making them the Piper Squad.
They became enormously popular on YouTube, right through the pandemic. There were 8.5 million subscribers at one time, according to NBC News.
Covid drove up the numbers and we are told those numbers never came down. Meanwhile, the boys and girls were getting older. Soon they were being pushed to have crushes on each other (crush videos are wildly popular), to share their first kiss with millions of viewers, and so on.
But who exactly were those viewers? One of the interviewees here says that the first 50,000 views of pretty much anything on YouTube don’t consist of real viewers but hits from bots, machines designed to drive up viewing figures. Yet there is no denying that the Piper Squad also got a lot of views from real-life humans as well. The members of the squad didn’t get as much money as Piper, obviously, but they were monetising their screen appearances, creating their own individual channels and doing pretty well.
They were charming kids and they were Piper’s friends. Last year, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times investigated Instagram sites featuring girls in their very early teens and younger and found out that a substantial proportion of the audience were adult men. Sophie Fergie (left) and Piper Rockelle in Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing.
Photo: Heather Nichole/Netflix © 2025 Tiffany Smith was shooting video after video with her boyfriend, Hunter Hill. The children were sometimes working round the clock, with no protection from labour laws. Their parents, many of whom were single parents, were delighted.
After all, whether you are a single or a married parent, an extra $10,000 a month is hard to turn down. (There are no sums specified for the earnings of the squad members during this period). One of the interviewees here, Brandon Stewart (“content strategist”) estimates that Smith had a six-figure income each month.
“Things can get very muddy when kids are making a lot of money,” says Ava Michelle, now an adult, who has had her own online presence. But the money wasn’t a problem, the enthusiastic parents were not a problem, the weird adult viewers weren’t a problem. The problem was inappropriate behaviour from an adult involved in making the videos and that adult was Tiffany Smith.
On one occasion she kissed 17-year-old Raegan Beast (don’t ask) on the mouth. Alcohol had been consumed by both parties. In the footage, it is Piper pulling her mother back from the boy.
Read more When Raegan woke up the next morning, this footage of the kiss had vanished. He couldn’t find it anywhere. God knows how the producers of Bad Influence found it.
Smith, an adult woman in her thirties, was flirting with boys much younger than Raegan. And gradually more and more of the kids pulled out, most of them at their own instigation. Their channels tanked.
Their parents got worried. “What had happened to our kids’ channels?” asks one concerned mother. Presumably they were in the process of losing fortunes.
Links to the channels of the former members of the squad were found on porn sites and gambling sites. “My channel has never been the same,” says squad member Sawyer sadly. In 2022, former squad members sued Tiffany Smith and Hunter Hill.
Last year, they settled, dividing $1.85m between the 11 of them. Piper had lost her friends but she soon got new ones.
She moved to a site that is frankly aimed at adults. Although there is no nudity allowed on this site, there was a lot of bikini footage. “I remember when you used to wear clothes,” comments one subscriber.
Piper moved on, perhaps in anticipation of this documentary. “Kidfluencing now is the wild, wild west,” says Brandon Stewart sagely. Nobody protects these children: not the platform provider, not the legal system and certainly not their parents.
Only Demi Lovato, herself a former child star, has come out to push for legislation in California, now signed into law by the governor, Gavin Newsom. #Presumably Piper just keeps on working. Read more.
