In a disturbing incident that occurred a year ago in Salt Lake City, a 12-year-old boy from a formerly popular YouTube family channel 8 Passengers escaped from his home and knocked on the door of a neighbor’s home begging for help. The boy, Russell Franke, asked for the neighbor to take him to the police station for “personal matters.”
In an article by the Salt Lake Tribune, the boy’s physical condition was described by a neighbor in these terms: “‘He has duct tape around each ankle. There’s sores around them, and he has them around his wrist as well. This boy has been,’ the man trails off, his voice breaking with emotion, ‘This kid has obviously been …’ Then the video ends.”
With the increased presence of social media in our everyday lives, more and more parents want to make the easy money they perceive comes with being a popular influencer.
Suddenly, family channels are all the rage, with families like the LaBrant Fam and 8 Passengers boasting subscriber bases in the millions. This trend has proved problematic as many Gen Z parents continue to post their kids online — often without consent — forcing them into a publicly viewed life and digital footprint they may later not want.
By exposing these kids to scrutiny on social media during their first few years of life, the parents impact their schooling, career and future.
The LaBrant Fam: Nonconsensual posting of their children from a young age
YouTubers Savannah LaBrant and Cole Labrant stepped away from their individual content creating styles on platforms like MySpace and Vine into YouTube, creating their family channel, The LaBrant Fam, in 2012. As the mother of 11-year-old Everleigh LaBrant, Savannah made the decision to homeschool her daughter “to have a second set of hands at home when the new baby comes.”
All five of her kids — Everleigh Rose Soutas-Smith, Posie Rayne LaBrant, Zealand Cole LaBrant, Sunday Savannah LaBrant and Beckam Blue LaBrant — have their own social media accounts, and are brought on the family channel vlogs regularly, despite being minors. The entire family has gotten into many scandals throughout their time on YouTube, one of many being about their 3rd born child, Zealand LaBrant. Zealand, 2, was experiencing many seizures and in one of them, his parents picked up the camera and recorded a vulnerable moment of their child’s life without any form of consent. This video will forever be on the internet, leaving their son open to public comment and scrutiny.
Additionally, the family has been accused of clickbaiting and promoting a cancer scam, spreading false information about fire evacuations and sharing videos that make extreme comparisons to the Holocaust.
As for the cancer controversy, a documentary posted by the Labrant Family stated that Posie, their 5-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer and posted a fake thumbnail and title touting the subject. Viewers found, only after 10 minutes of the video, that Posie was indeed fine and the entire video was fake. It turned out that the video was about other families whose children had been diagnosed with cancer, yet Savannah and Cole were behaving as though their own daughter had cancer.
8 Passengers: Channel highlights parental abuse of their children
8 Passengers started in 2015 and ended in 2022. It shows an unhealthy relationship between the parents and their kids and deteriorated from exploitation into alleged abuse. In fact, the mother is on the brink of a lifetime jail sentence.
Starting off like many other family channels as a picture perfect family, the dark side of 8 Passengers was soon revealed in 2023. The mother, Ruby Franke, has six children: Shari, Chad, Abby, Julie, Russell and Eve. Throughout her YouTube videos, she showcased her love for her kids by sharing their success and life journey alongside her husband, Kevin Franke.
However, it goes further than typical parental bragging. In a video where two of Franke’s sons are fighting, she attempts to break them apart and says that if they continue fighting, they will “lose the privilege to eat dinner.”
As for the incident with 12-year-old boy Russell Franke, the home which Russelll escaped from belonged to Jodi Hildebrandt, Ruby Franke’s business partner and close friend. Upon entering, police discovered 10-year-old Eve being held inside of a closet in a similar state to her brother.
Both kids were “taken to [the] hospital [after] suffering malnourishment and “deep lacerations from being tied up with rope,” according to the arrest record.
Following this incident, Ruby Franke was arrested for abuse and exploitation of her children and is now on trial in a case which could potentially lead to a lifetime jail sentence.
These family channels, among many others, have shown how parents can take advantage of their kids, plastering their faces on the internet for everyone to see. Worse still, some of these parents, who already have dark pasts with social media, physically and psychologically abuse their own children.
Setting a boundary between exploiting their children for views and sharing bits and pieces of their lives is a line that many family channels need to set. Even sharing home videos and personal incidents on the internet leads to young children’s lives being exposed without asking for their consent.
It’s crucial that parents allow their children to make their own choices when they are old enough rather than forcing them to be influencers and exploiting them for profit.
