Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing

After we left The Squad,

Piper's video got posted about our kids.

And that was hard.

The content on that video was

Piper, Lev, Elliana, Emily.

They were sitting on the edge Piper's bed.

And I remember Piper going through each of the kids

and why these kids had left.

I just have to say, you know, everyone that leaves The Squad,

they always blame it on a toxic, you know, place, environment.

It's really not. We're all really, really good friends.

And we have a lot of fun.

I'm not gonna sit here and let people say

that we're a toxic place.

You could tell Piper is...

Piper's uncomfortable.

This was very coached.

There's not me telling... no adult.

There's no one controlling Piper, I swear.

And now that I've been on the other side of these videos,

you could tell that she was being very coached.

In the video, she also unfollowed each of our kids.

I'm on The Squad following page,

and we're going to unfollow them right now.

First one here is Claire.

Obviously, you know, she's my cousin,

and we've had very, very, very fun times together.

So our kids sat there and watched this,

and watched the wrath of what was happening.

And the comments...

The hate comments were... horrible.

I was only 13,

and I was getting hate from all across the world.

I was in such a vulnerable place

where I was really internalizing what I was seeing.

These kids were being attacked.

Like I call them, "the hate campaigns."

I don't know if they were orchestrated by Tiffany or bots,

or if they were real kids, but they were being attacked online.

You think about kids in middle America, and they get bullied.

This is a different level of bullying.

This is not just 100 kids in your town.

This is the whole world.

It definitely hurt a lot to see everything everybody was saying.

It felt like I was being judged and criticized.

I feel anger towards the situation

'cause people will tag me in what "Piper said about me."

And it's like, I know that's Tiffany.

And you're lying to these fans,

saying that that's your daughter talking, and it's not, it's you.

Tiffany is on her phone,

talking shit to children under Piper's account.

And she'd go into group chats.

She would start hate campaigns to go after whoever left The Squad at that time,

and just setting up fan accounts.

We know for a fact Tiffany was running fan accounts

to speak ill of The Squad members that left.

My son is so devastated.

I just would like her to stop.

Leave my kid alone. Leave these kids alone.

Focus on your own. Just leave our kids alone.

After we left The Squad,

all of the kids' social media, especially their YouTube,

was just tanking and getting no views.

I was emailing YouTube

and talking to people on Fiverr, trying to do SEO.

I was trying to figure out what had happened to Sawyer's channel.

When did you start losing subscribers?

So basically, Sawyer left on 15th February.

And then, within two days,

now we're losing subscribers.

And hundreds of subscribers a day.

Yeah. This is a... a really unusual falloff.

Um... I would not expect to see, like, such a... a strong cutoff,

unless there was an active campaign,

where, you know, somebody... an influencer with influence over their audience

would say, "Hey, go unsubscribe to this channel," right?

We've seen that many times.

But in this, for us, going negative within two days,

the audience didn't even know that Sawyer had left.

They were eventually told to unsubscribe, but...

Fans didn't know Sawyer had left The Squad at this point.

Yeah. Only, you know, Hunter and Tiffany.

We felt like they were doing this to our channels.

When Claire's channel numbers started going down,

that's whenever I thought, "Oh no. Here we go."

We had multiple phone calls between the parents.

You know, here's Claire's analytics. Here's these other kids' analytics.

And it was the same graph for all the kids.

A few of the moms spent months and months and months researching

how to stop Tiffany.

The goal was to figure out what she's doing to our channels

and reverse it.

We're sharing information, trying to figure this out together.

We talked to many different entities.

And finally, we were directed to the law firm that we work with.

Tiffany and her boyfriend slash business partner, Hunter,

they've said in the past that they have the ability,

and they have in the past done these kinds of things to other people.

I was the first person it happened to.

And now everybody knows, if you leave The Squad,

your views will go down,

you'll lose subscribers, you'll lose followers.

You're going to get blacklisted.

As soon as I left,

Hunter went in and turned off the notifications on my channel.

And then we logged him out.

And he just went crazy trying to log back in,

trying to get the password from us.

There's a whole world of dark arts

that goes behind these channels.

And it's an entire underbelly of the social media ecosystem

that you don't see.

You know, behind the scenes, there's these people buying bot networks,

paying people to mass report accounts, get them flagged, get them down-ranked.

Which would be going in on different accounts

and clicking "report the video."

And we know that's been done because some of the videos,

you can't even put a Google ad on to promote

because YouTube thinks it's violent,

when it's, like, a video of me and my friends

sitting down talking on the couch.

We found out later on

that the videos were being embedded in porn sites and gambling sites

and other bad sites

that would negatively affect the SEO of my YouTube channel.

If your name is linked to one of these porn sites,

it's gonna impact, you know, hits when it comes to subscribers.

It's gonna show up on a Google search.

And that's going to adversely impact your name forever.

The Internet is written in ink. It's not written in pencil.

My YouTube channel has never been the same.

I think it's forever tarnished.

Everything I worked for.

Hey, guys. I'm Sawyer.

And I just started my YouTube channel a couple days ago.

Everything that I cared about and was motivated to work on,

getting sabotaged by people that I thought wanted to help me,

by people that I trusted.

So we have filed a civil lawsuit against Tiffany and against Hunter Hill.

And we've not sued Piper individually. We have no claims against her.

And we're seeking collectively in the tens of millions of dollars

for all 11 kids in this lawsuit.

In 2022, this lawsuit is filed,

alleging a lot of wrongdoing, a lot of bad behavior,

and kind of pulling the curtain back

on a lot of really bad things that were happening behind the scenes.

When I first started on this case, I read the original complaint.

And the parents at that time were mostly concerned about the effects

that they saw on these kids' careers.

And everything that was done to these kids' YouTube accounts.

- Okay, ready? - Yeah.

We went in, and we asked the kids questions.

And we discovered that the stories that the parents had told us

about what was going on were just the tip of an iceberg.

What we have is 11 kids whose stories all line up.

Oh.

And what they did to these children is shocking.

- Oh my G... -

After we filed the complaint,

um, we went through a process that's called discovery.

And I know, for a lot of you, we're meeting for the first time today.

In my understandings, you're still learning more

about what the kids went through that you didn't know.

It seemed like, originally, a lot of you came to this case

because of the interference with the YouTube channels.

And after the case started, as you met with Matt and... and our firm,

you discovered all these other elements, um, to the story,

the emotional abuse they went through, the verbal abuse they went through,

the sexual abuse they went through.

When I first heard from Claire and Reese about what happened to them,

we had our first meeting as a group with our lawyers.

And the lawyers started asking questions.

Sophie said something.

And then Claire's like, "Me too."

And then, um, Reese was like, "Me too."

And then Hayden was like, "Well, she did this to me."

And then Sawyer says, "She did this."

And then everybody just kind of started unloading.

We were not prepared to hear stories of the sexual stuff.

Now we're in a really dark area.

And it made me feel... even worse for letting her stay.

I can't really remember what conversation led up to this,

but I remember Tiffany asking me, like,

"Corinne, like, have you ever given a blow job?"

And I was just like, "What's that?"

When I was younger, like, I didn't know what that was.

I was... confused.

And then she was, like, giggling and laughing.

And I looked at Hunter, and Hunter was, like, laughing.

And then she was like,

"Oh, like, you can, like, do it on Hunter."

Like, "I'll show you, like, with Hunter."

And then they were, like, laughing, like, really hard.

And then Piper was like, "Oh, like, Mom, stop. Like... stop."

Like, Piper was saying stop.

I was 11.

It makes me feel sad for my younger self.

I feel like I could have easily been,