Everyone In Netflix’s Piper Rockelle Doc 'Bad Influence' Should Feel Deeply Ashamed

For those who have no reason to keep up with such things (and that should include all adults), or even for those who have children who aren’t allowed to keep up with such things: Remember how Nickelodeon had all those hugely successful kids’ shows that spun off from each other (iCarly, Zoey 101, Victorious, Sam & Cat, etc.)?

That’s still going on, only now it’s moved to YouTube and social media. And instead of scripted series, the kids’ personal lives are mined for content. But make no mistake: it still involves the same overworked kids, still being asked to do things wildly inappropriate for their age. The kidfluencer world even has its own Dan Schneider.

Her name is Tiffany Smith, a momager who emerges as the Dan Schneider of Netflix’s latest deeply gross documentary about the child exploitation industry, Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing. Smith is a single mother whose daughter, Piper Rockelle, got her start at a very young age on Lifetime’s Dance Moms-adjacent Dance Twins, before the two moved their act to YouTube. There, Smith, 42, and her 28-year-old boyfriend, Hunter Hill, spent years mining Rockelle’s life for content (I want to say that she was 36 and he was 20 when their relationship began, which is not surprising given that Smith kissed at least one minor on camera, per the documentary).

Rockelle is apparently a massively popular kidfluencer, with millions of followers since she was eight or nine. And Smith — at least as depicted in Bad Influence — is a tyrannical stage mom, forcing her daughter to work 14-15 hour days, churning out multiple videos daily to feed the algorithm and rake in cash. These videos included elaborate dances, cruel pranks, and the exploitation of adolescent crushes. And, as Rockelle got older, her content shifted to something far more unsettling: behaving, dressing, and performing in ways designed to appeal to the most disturbing segment of her audience: Adult men.

The reason Bad Influence exists without the participation of Rockelle, Smith, or Hill is a lawsuit filed several years ago by the parents of 11 other kids. Most of the documentary’s accounts come from these parents and some of the kids themselves. The kidfluencer economy worked much like the old Nickelodeon ecosystem: if Rockelle put a friend or crush in a video, that kid gained followers, built their own brand, and maybe even earned a cut of the profits. And often, those kids were then managed, for a percentage, by Smith and Hill.

The problem? When parents tried to pull their kids out of Rockelle’s orbit, usually after Smith had bullied them, overworked them, or acted wildly inappropriately, Smith retaliated. She blacklisted their kids, iced them out of the influencer world entirely, and effectively destroyed their ability to monetize their online fame. The parents were furious, not just at how Smith treated their kids but also at the prospect of losing the huge incomes their children generated. So they sued. And as they compared stories, the allegations got darker: bullying, harassment, overwork, and eventually sexual misconduct.

Smith denied everything, of course. She later settled the lawsuit for $1.85 million. It’s hard not to feel for these kids, less so for their parents, who gleefully threw them into this unsupervised, toxic hellscape in the first place. As for Rockelle, she’s now 17 and still a major social media presence, though, disturbingly, she’s reportedly shifted to a platform resembling OnlyFans for minors, where anonymous adult men can pay for her content.

It’s skeevy. All of it.

And yet, even the kids who sued Smith, the ones featured in this documentary, can’t quite hide their eagerness to return to their former level of fame. “Piper is a victim of her mom, too,” they all dutifully repeat, hiding their shade behind concern. Maybe that’s true. But it’s also hard to shake the feeling that most of them would jump right back into Piper’s inner circle tomorrow if it meant reclaiming their YouTube clout.

It’s all so gross. The kidfluencer industry. The documentary. The parents. Even some of the talking heads (Brandon Stewart, Taylor Lorenz) who seem a little too eager to brand themselves as experts on child exploitation on the Internet while participating in a Netflix documentary about it.

The whole thing is toxic. After watching it, I needed a long, scalding shower, maybe several, to get all the ick off. Kids being consumed by social media is bad enough. Creating content for it is far worse.