Malas influencias: El lado oscuro de las redes en la infancia

I've seen a lot of Netflix documentaries and this one definitely is a stand out. With these types of docs, I'm used to my time being wasted and treated like i'm barely even watching. Surprisingly almost every bit of this documentary is disturbing and telling. It is a problem I was vaguely aware of but not nearly to this extent or what was really at play. There are many jaw dropping moments and it has a lot of substance to really think about. While at times the interviews are a bit frustrating because of the lack of accountability and blame shifting, I think it leaves a lot of food for thought and effectively reveals the truth.

I watched it at one go just a while ago. A must watch for parents and alike to understand how vulnerable we all are to virtual fame and the easy money. Exposing kids to camera, filming, sharing, looking for validation and endorsements is selling the childhood of the kids to others. It's nothing less than the child labor exploiting emotional and physical health of the kids. No amount of justifications for such parenting activities is acceptable. It's about time Govt came up with some laws and started implementing it!

The old adage 'A picture speaks thousands words' no longer holds true. Every single picture is fabricated and manipulated for reasons beyond the comprehension of the consumer of the content!

It is the story of a girl who became a sensation through social media platforms. It is the journey of Piper, who became a breadwinner for her single mother.

The title of the latest documentary series on Netflix aims to draw society's attention to the grim side of the lives of kid influencers. The doc dated back to 2017, when YouTube was slowly becoming a thing. The birth of a Momager, Tiffany, who created havoc across the internet through her kids and another adolescent, making them a SQAUD.

The three-part deliberately maintained the attention over the creepy life parts where a bunch of growing kids start losing life as they slowly become a money-making machine.

In 2025, when internet celebrities are roaring louder than ever, the series chronicles the early stage of the phenomenon. It talked about that time when the internet was still not cheap and peasants were slowly becoming more accessible.

The case of Piper shot at its peak when other members of the famous SQUAD brought serious allegations against Tiffany.

Three episodes include snippets from the past when children used to live under one roof, while being filmed under different circumstances. The act of kissing, a fake love trope, has been used to reflect the toxic environment these kids grow up. With the intervention that happened back in 2022, things started changing.

When we expose our real life to the world, things start changing. Life starts acting differently, and the comments and reactions received from strangers play a decisive role in life. Making your child a source of income is not a decision that parents should take. By making them as your source of income, you are not jeopardising their childhood or adolescence, but stopping them from finding what they are seeking from life.

I work in influencer marketing, so this was incredibly relevant for me. We have to be careful when we're working with family focused creators because we absolutely want to avoid situations like this where the kids are being manipulated and exploited.

This story goes even further than just financial and emotional exploitation sadly. I hope more stories start coming out about similar situations because I know they're out there, and the more we can do to protect children from this kind of mess the better. It really drops the facade of these kids all having fun and doing it on their own and shows you how manipulated and puppeted they were to make money for the mother. Gross!

So the topic of this docu-series was very interesting, very eye opening, but the way it was executed felt wrong and honestly kind of strange. The parents seem to not really take much accountability for putting their children in these awful situations, the people they chose to interview seemed to be biased about the topic and seemed to still think it was okay to have your children plastered all over social media. This whole docu-series just seems like even more exploitation. I think they should have taken this topic a bit more seriously. I felt gross throughout the entire duration of this new Netflix "expose" which at this point just seems to be more click bait without any real consideration for the topic at hand.