Utah has passed a law to protect child influencers after the abuse conviction of mother of six Ruby Franke.
Gov. Spencer Cox signed a law on Tuesday that gives adults a path to scrub any digital content they were featured in as minors from any platforms.
It also requires parents to set money aside for children featured in online content.
Franke posted regular videos of her seemingly tight-knit Mormon family to her now-defunct YouTube channel, 8 Passengers, before viewers raised alarm about her disciplinary methods.
She was later charged with and pleaded guilty to four felony counts of child abuse.
Franke’s now ex-husband Kevin Franke told lawmakers in February that he wished he had never let her post their children’s lives online and use them for profit.
“Children cannot give informed consent to be filmed on social media, period,” he said.
“Vlogging my family, putting my children into public social media, was wrong, and I regret it every day.”
Utah is a hotbed for the lucrative family blogging industry, with its large nuclear families and religious lifestyles.
The reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives brought widespread attention to a group of Utah-based Mormon mothers and TikTok creators known as “MomTok” who create content about their families and faith.
The content-creation industry is largely unregulated, but laws in Illinois and Minnesota allow children to sue parents who do not set aside money for them. Utah’s law goes further, allowing content featuring minors to be taken down.
Son’s escape from home leads to investigation
The Franke children were featured prominently in videos posted up to five times a week to an audience of 2.5 million in 2010.
Two years later, Ruby Franke stopped posting to the family channel and began creating parenting content with therapist Jodi Hildebrandt, who encouraged her to cut contact with Kevin Franke and move her two youngest children into Hildebrandt’s southern Utah home.
The women were arrested on child abuse charges after Ruby Franke’s emaciated 12-year-old son Russell escaped through a window and knocked on a neighbor’s door. The neighbors noticed his ankles were wrapped in bloody duct tape and called 911.
Officers then found 9-year-old Eve, the youngest Franke child, sitting cross-legged in a dark closet in Hildebrandt’s house with her hair buzzed off.
The women were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.
In handwritten journal entries, Ruby Franke insists repeatedly that her son is possessed by the devil and describes months of daily abuse that included starving her children and forcing them to work for hours in the summer heat without protection.
Hoping to strike ‘content gold’
In a memoir published after her mother’s arrest, Shari, the eldest child, described how Ruby Franke’s obsession with “striking content gold” and chasing views led her to view her children as employees who needed to be disciplined.
Shari wrote that her mother directed the children “like a Hollywood producer” and subjected them to constant video surveillance.
She has called herself a “victim of family vlogging”.
Under the Utah law, online creators who make more than $150,000 a year from content featuring children will be required to set aside 15 per cent of those earnings into a trust fund that the kids can access when they turn 18.
Parents of child actors appearing in TV or film projects will also be required to place a portion of their earnings in a trust.
Eve Franke, the youngest child, wrote in a statement to lawmakers that they had power to protect other kids from exploitation.
“I’m not saying YouTube is a bad thing. Sometimes it brings us together,” she wrote.
“But kids deserve to be loved, not used by the ones that are supposed to love them the most.”
Source link
