Tag: reviews

April 12, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing”

Directed by Kief Davidson and Jenna Rosher

Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” (based on The Avatist magazine article “Crushed”) features a predominantly white group of people (with one Latino) discussing the contoversy over social media influencer Piper Rockelle, her mother/manager Tiffany Smith and Smith’s boyfriend Hunter Hill and issues about children being exploited and abused when making social media videos.

Culture Clash: Several people have accused Smith and Hill of overworking the kids in their videos, while Smith has also been accused of sexual abuse and other inappropriate actions with children.

Culture Audience: “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about scandals involving social media stars.

“Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” is a catchy title because “kidfluencing” is a word defined as social media influencing that involves kids. However, this documentary is not an overview of the entire kidfluencing industry because it really just focuses on the controversy over social media influencer Piper Rockelle and her mother/manager Tiffany Smith. Also part of the controversy is Hunter Hill, who is Smith’s boyfriend and the director/cinematographer/editor of the reality TV-styled “hangout” videos that have generated millions of dollars in revenue for this trio. It’s mentioned that at the peak of Rockelle’s financial success, while she was an underage teen, she was making $500,000 a month from her social media videos, sponsorships and other business deals.

Smith has been accused of being a toxic force in the lives of Rockelle (who was born in 2007) and others who have worked with Smith, who created a business empire revolving around videos of her daughter and her online friends, who are collectively called The Squad. Most of the videos are filmed at the Los Angeles home where Rockelle, Smith and Hill live. The problem is that in the murky and often-unregulated area of content creation for social media, there were blurred boundaries between what was considered making videos for fun and making videos as work that required paid compensation and labor law protection.

The controversy has included a high-profile lawsuit that has since been settled out of court. This documentary series serves as an effective warning about child exploitation and abuse in unregulated areas of social media. However, there needed to be more accountability from the parents and companies that make money from this mistreatment of kids. “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” is based on The Avatist magazine’s 2024 article “Crushed,” written by Nile Cappello. The documentary filmmakers could have done more investigating on their own to give a more well-rounded report of these complicated situations where there are many sides to the story.

The documentary mentions that the parents of children who worked with Rockelle, Smith, and Hill on these social media videos allowed these kids to work more than 12 hours a day, often past midnight, without any supervision from the parents, whom Smith prohibited from being at the locations where these videos were filmed. Most of the children were between the ages of 11 and 15 when they worked with Rockelle at various times from 2018 to 2022. The documentary gives no insight whatsoever into the responsibility that sponsors had in funding and profiting from work conditions that allegedly violated labor laws and were allegedly abusive and sexually inappropriate.

The explosive allegations against Smith went public in 2022. That’s when Smith, her boyfriend Hill and the business entity known as Piper Rockelle Inc. were sued for $22 million by 11 people who claimed that they were subjected to illegal labor as underage children and inappropriate sexual acts/harassment during their work as a group of social media influencers called The Squad, which is associated with Rockelle. In October 2024, the lawsuit was settled out of court for $1.85 million, to be shared among the 11 plaintiffs.

Directed by Kief Davidson and Jenna Rosher, “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” certainly has an agenda to expose what people say are often-hidden horrors that children experience when they are controlled by harmful adults who are usually the ones who profit the most from children’s social-media work. The majority of people interviewed in the documentary are former work colleagues or former associates of Smith who have negative things to say about her. However, a better investigative documentary would have included insight or interviews with people who continue to work with Smith to explain why (at the time this documentary was made and released) Smith continues to thrive as the manager of a social media star.

The documentary has interviews with some of the plaintiffs, who allege many of the things also described in the lawsuit. According to the accusations, the videos with Rockelle started off as harmless and fun. But as time went on, according to the accusers, Smith pressured the kids to have fake romances and sexualized them as a show for the camera. Off camera, the plaintiffs alleged that the abuse was much worse.

In each episode of the documentary, there’s an epilogue caption stating that Rockelle, Smith and Hill declined to comment or give an interview for the documentary. Smith has publicly denied the abuse and exploitation allegations against her. In addition to interviewing people who have complaints about Smith and Hill, the documentary interviews journalists, attorneys and Internet experts.

What’s missing from the documentary are interviews with people representing companies that made Rockelle, Smith and Hall millionaires. After all, this lawsuit would not have received as much attention if not for the millions of dollars at stake not just from the lawsuit but also from the money generated by being in business with Piper Rockelle and her representatives. The majority of these millions come from corporate sponsors, whose perspectives are noticeably absent in this documentary. It’s not mentioned if the documentary filmmakers attempted to contact these sponsors for interviews or comments.

Episode 1, titled “#momager,” details the personal backgrounds of Smith and her daughter Rockelle; their rise to Internet success; and how Smith gathered a group of other young people to be part of The Squad. Episode 2, titled “#crush,” is about Smith being the driving force to have Rockelle’s videos focus on The Squad’s adolescent crushes that were almost always fabricated for the cameras but presented to audiences as real. Episode 3, titled “#unfollow,” describes how Squad members began to quit over sexually inappropriate actions they say they were subjected to while working with Smith, as well as the alleged blacklisting tactics that Smith and Hall used against those who spoke out against them.

Rockelle and Smith are both originally from the state of Georgia. Rockelle is the only child of Smith, who raised her as a single mother when Rockelle’s father abandoned them when Smith was pregnant. Smith, who was 26 when she gave birth to her daughter, used to work as a dog groomer. The documentary could have done more to investigate Smith’s personal history. The only people interviewed in the documentary who’ve known her for a long time are members of her family who admittedly have grudges against her.

The name of Rockelle’s father is not mentioned in the documentary. For the purposes of this review, Piper Rockelle will be referred to from now on as Piper. What’s not mentioned in the documentary is the fact that Piper’s YouTube channel has videos from 2021 where she is shown meeting up with and having awkward conversations with someone she says is her father and whom she hasn’t seen him 13 to 14 years. His face is not shown on camera, but his voice appears to be unaltered. In these YouTube videos, he’s very much aware of Piper’s social media fame because he’s constantly reminded of it in their conversations.

However, skeptics might wonder if it was really was Piper’s father in those videos or possibly someone impersonating her father. It’s a valid question that the documentary doesn’t investigate, even though the documentary brings up allegations that most of what was on Piper’s social media videos were faked for the cameras and orchestrated by Smith and Hill. According to what Piper and Hill have said in subsequent YouTube videos, Piper’s reunions with her biological father did not result in her being able to establish a relationship with him.

How did Piper end up as a social media star? The documentary gives a fairly good summary of her rise to fame. Piper (who showed talent in mostly in dancing and singing) began competing in child beauty pageants at the age of 3 and quickly amassed several winning trophies from these pageants. The documentary includes archival videos and photos of Piper in some of these beauty pageants, where girls under the age of 10 often wear outfits and makeup that you would normally see on teens and adults.

Patience Rock Smith (Tiffany Smith’s younger sister) is one of the people interviewed in the documentary. She comments, “I think Tiffany’s drive for Piper’s success was to show Piper’s dad that she was worth something and that he’s missing out on her life.” Patience adds that Tiffany was extremely competitive and put a lot of pressure on Piper to win in these beauty pageants. “Tiffany was not happy with second place,” Patience adds.

Later in the documentary, Patience gives more insight into their family relationship. She says that their parents divorced when she and Tiffany were children. According to Patience, Tiffany took the divorce very hard and became an angry person. This led to Patience and Tiffany becoming estranged from each other for a number of years, but they reconnected after Tiffany became a mother.

Patience Rock Smith is also a mother. She and her wife Ashley Rock Smith are raising Ashley’s biological daughters Claire Rock Smith and Reese Rock Smith, who are all interviewed in the documentary. Claire and Reese were also part of The Squad and are two of the three girls in the documentary who claim that Tiffany touched them inappropriately.

When Piper outgrew the kiddie pageant circuit, she and her mother Tiffany tried TV and the Internet to find more fame. They appeared on the short-lived Lifetime reality TV series “Dance Twins,” featuring twin sisters who compete against each other in training dancers for child beauty pageants. The documentary includes a video clip from “Dance Twins,” where Tiffany can be seen telling Rockelle: “This is a really good time for you to get first place. I would like that.”

Although “Dance Twins” was televised in 2021, the show seems to have been filmed years earlier, because Piper does not look like a teenager in the footage, and she had already left the pageant world behind by the early 2020s. It was through “Dance Twins” that Piper met Corinne Joy, who auditioned to be a backup dancer for Piper. That audition was shown in “Dance Twins.”

Joy and her mother Steevy Areeco are interviewed in the documentary. They both say that for a while, Joy and Piper were very close friends and were members of The Squad. But that friendship ended when Joy and her mother found out a very disturbing secret about something Tiffany did: Tiffany allegedly mailed Piper’s underwear to adult male fans who wanted to smell the underwear.

Joy was featured in Piper’s earliest YouTube videos, before The Squad existed. A YouTube video from the mid-2010s titled “Corinne/Piper Pumpkin Patch” is described as Piper’s first video that went viral with more than 1 million views. (That video has since been removed from YouTube, but a snippet of the video is in the documentary.) Piper also did videos using Music.ly that showcased her talents in singing and dancing.

In 2017, Tiffany and Piper moved to Los Angeles, where they found more opportunities for on-screen exposure for Piper. Hill, who is originally from Wyoming, met Tiffany and Piper not long after Tiffany and Piper had moved to Los Angeles. He quickly became involved in Piper’s videos, in front of and behind the camera. He also moved into the home where Tiffany and Piper lived and where most of the videos were filmed.

At first, Hill was described in the videos as Piper’s older brother. But that was a lie. In reality, Hill and Tiffany became lovers and eventually went public about this relationship. At the time that Hill and Tiffany became romantically involved, he was 20, and she was 36. On social media, Hill now describes himself as Piper’s father.

In 2017, Piper became a cast member of “Mani,” an Internet series about a male nanny. The show was produced by a children-oriented Internet company called Brat. It was through “Mani” that Piper met Sophie Fergi, who would become Piper’s best friend and an on-again/off-again member of The Squad for almost four years.

In “Mani,” Piper played the perky good girl, while Fergi was cast as the moody Goth girl. Piper’s time on “Mani” did not end well. According to Fergi, Tiffany had a stage mother meltdown in 2018 because another cast member got more lines of dialogue than Piper for a particular episode. Tiffany made Piper quit the show that day, and they never went back. According to the Internet Movie Database, Piper appeared in 29 episodes of “Mani” from 2017 to 2018.

Tiffany expected Fergi and her mother to also quit the show in solidarity, but they refused, which led to a temporary estrangement between the two pairs of mothers and daughters. Fergi comments in the documentary about the dispute over the “Mani” TV show: “I realized that Tiffany was unstable and you have to be careful around her.”

All four of them eventually reconciled around the time that Piper started doing videos on her own YouTube channel. Tiffany was the one who recruited kids to be part of The Squad. In other words, these were not friendships that were started naturally. These were casting decisions, although genuine friendships seemed to have developed among many of The Squad members after they started working together.

Fergi and her single mother Heather Nichole (also known as Heather Trimmer), who is also interviewed in the documentary, eventually lived with Piper, Tiffany and Hill. Fergi’s mother Nichole became the stylist for The Squad and was a very close confidante of Smith and Hill. Fergi says that Child Protective Services officials interviewed them in response to complaints that Tiffany was abusing Squad members, but Fergi and Piper lied and said that there was no child abuse.

Nichole admits that she blindly followed Smith’s orders but did not tolerate the sexual abuse when she found out that the abuse was allegedly going on with her own daughter. Fergi is one of the girls in the documentary who claims that Tiffany sexually abused her through inappropriate touching. However, there’s a part of the documentary where Fergi breaks down in tears and says that Tiffany did other things to her that Fergi doesn’t want to talk about on camera. This statement is an indication that the alleged abuse went beyond touching.

During and after this quest for fame and fortune, Piper was not getting a school education inside or outside the home, according to several people interviewed in the documentary. Her aunt Patience says that at the time, “I didn’t understand it, but I supported them [Tiffany and Piper] in whatever they wanted to do.” Patience also says, “From a very young age, Piper wanted to please her mother.”

By 2018, The Squad and their videos began to go viral and generated enough of an audience and revenue for Squad members to pursue their social media activities as real careers. The concept of The Squad was that the group always revolved around Piper, and everyone else was a sidekick who could be replaced. Several people in the documentary describe Tiffany as eventually treating The Squad like a cult, where Tiffany is the very manipulative and vindictive leader.

The Squad members were not paid to be in Piper’s videos because they were told that the exposure of being in the videos was enough of a reward. According to Fergi and other former Squad members interviewed in the documentary, Squad members worked on videos for Piper’s social media channels for more than 12 hours a day, often without breaks for meals. Their work often stretched past midnight. And they also had to clean the house where the videos were filmed. All of this was done without financial compensation.

The Squad members were free to create their own YouTube channels where they could make their own money, but even then, they weren’t in total control. Hill and Tiffany demanded password access and creative control over many of The Squad’s members’ individual YouTube channels. Squad members were told that this access was required for them to remain members of The Squad. Those who left The Squad believe that Hill and Smith engaged in online sabotage to make the former Squad members lose viewers and subscribers on the former Squad members’ social media platforms.

Where were these kids’ parents during all of these long work hours? And when did these kids have time to get a school education? The documentary mentions that most of the Squad kids were homeschooled. And there was some effort for the kids to have “school hours” during their work hours.

The parents interviewed in the documentary are all parents of former Squad members. The parents admit that Tiffany prohibited them from being on the premises where the filming was. The parents went along with this demand. Some of them claim that Tiffany manipulated them into thinking these work hours were normal for showbiz kids.

What’s unsaid in the documentary is that these parents were probably motivated by greed from the money that their kids were making from being associated with The Squad. How else would you explain why parents would allow their underage kids to work more than 12 hours a day and why the parents agreed to stay away from the work locations while their children did this work? The documentary lets these parents off the hook too easily but not asking some of these tough and uncomfortable questions about their own motivations to get money and perks from their children’s work.

Sawyer Sharbino, a former Squad member, says that at the peak of his social media fame, he was making about $50,000 a month. Some of parents in the documentary express shame and remorse that they were complicit in their kids being exploited. However, they try to minimize their responsibility by saying they eventually did the right thing by rescuing their children and making them quit The Squad. Apparently, these parents were okay with the illegal child labor but were not okay with the alleged sexual abuse.

Fergi’s mother Nichole admits that not only was Nichole complicit, she was also an active participant in the exploitation, including following Tiffany’s orders to make Fergi dress in “sluttier” clothes than Piper. Nichole gets tearful when she talks about the guilt she feels about the suffering that her daughter experienced. She makes a weak excuse that she was a single parent who got caught up in trying to have a secure financial future for herself and her daughter. Just call it what it is: Letting your child be exploited because of greed.

Nichole also says she was one of the few people who knew in advance about a cruel prank that Tiffany and Hill planned for a February 2020 video in which Lev Cameron (Piper’s on-screen “crush” and Squad member at the time) got “arrested” by two “cops” who were later revealed to be paid actors. Clips video is also shown in the documentary. It shows Nichole’s daughter Fergi crying and almost having a hyperventilating panic attack because she thought at the time that the arrest was real.

In 2018, The Squad consisted of Piper (age 11), Joy (age 11), Sharbino (age 12), Symmone Harrison (age 12), Gavin Magnus (age 11) and Emily Dobson (age 11). Over the next four years, Squad members would include Fergi, Joy, Claire Rock Smith, Reese Rock Smith, Ayden Mekus, Connor Cain, Donlad Dougher, Hayden Haas, Walker Bryant and Jentzen Ramirez, just to name some of the members. The 11 plaintiffs in the lawsuit were Fergi, Joy, Claire Rock Smith, Reese Rock Smith, Sharbino, Harrison, Mekus, Cain, Dougher, Haas and Bryant. Most of the plaintiffs left The Squad in 2021, except for Joy, who left in 2019.

Joy left The Squad shortly after an unsettling incident that she describes in the documentary: Joy says that she saw Tiffany put a pair of Piper’s panties in a package to mail. When Joy asked Tiffany why, Tiffany replied that it was because old men liked to smell Piper’s underwear. Joy innocently told her mother, who confronted Tiffany about it. Tiffany’s response was that Joy’s mother was overreacting.

It’s interesting that Joy and her mother have different ways of describing Joy’s exit from The Squad. Joy describes it as an ouster under Tiffany’s orders. Joy’s mother Areeco says she made Joy quit the group after she found out that Tiffany was allegedly sending Piper’s underwear to men for sexual reasons. (Tiffany has publicly denied those accusations.) Joy and her mother claim that Tiffany “blacklisted” them and ordered the other members of The Squad and their parents to never talk to Joy and her mother again.

Other stories in the documentary seem to indicate that Tiffany was aware of and encouraged adult male fans who seemed to have a sexual interest in Piper. The documentary mentions a Wall Street Journal study that showed that men are the majority of viewers for social media videos starring underage girls. Fergi talks about a man who used the alias Megan and who was obsessed with Piper, who knew that Megan was really a man. This obsessed fan bombarded Piper with many gifts that Tiffany asked for, such as computers and high-end video cameras. Tiffany also allegedly made Piper talk to Megan on the phone.

Tiffany had her own obsessive quirks. She is described as someone who collected stray cats and was taking care of 30 to 60 cats at the same time. She had a pug dog named Frank, who would appear in Squad videos as a talking character, with Tiffany as the voice of Frank. Tiffany would use this character to insult Squad members on cameras a “joke.” Fergi says she got the worst of the insults.

A more disturbing way that Tiffany used an animal as an alter ego was by pretending to be her dead kitten Lenny, and she would talk in a different voice as Lenny. According to Fergi and sisters Claire Rock Smith and Reese Rock Smith, Tiffany would be alone with them in a room on separate occasions and would pin them down while pretending to be Lenny and forcing the girls to let her touch them all over their body. These alleged incidents sometimes happened when the girls were sleeping in bed and woken up by Tiffany.

Later in the documentary, Ashley Rock Smith says that she and her wife Patience were interviewed by the FBI about Tiffany allegedly abusing Claire and Reese. Ashley and Patience haven’t heard from the FBI since then. Ashley comments that they were told the FBI was unlikely to pursue the case unless they had enough proof to win the case. Because the alleged abuse incidents of the girls happened when Tiffany was alone in a room with an alleged victim, there were no other witnesses to prove if the abuse happened or not.

Tiffany’s sexual harassment of an underage teenager was actually caught on video in an Instagram livestream with Raegan Fingles, a transgender male who uses the social media name Raegan Beast. The video that has since been deleted, but the footage from the video is in the documentary. In the video, Tiffany forcibly and sexually kisses a visibly shocked Fingles (who was 17 years old at the time) twice on his mouth.

This incident happened in California, where 18 is the minimum age of consent for a person to engage in sexual activity. Even if Fingles had been 18, forcible kissing can still be considered sexual assault. Because he was under 18 when it happened, the forcible kissing could be defined a sexual assault of a child under California law.

Fingles is interviewed in the documentary and says that Tiffany was drunk, and she gave alcohol to him and other underage kids before the livestream happened. He also said that in the days leading up to the forcible kissing incident, Tiffany would flirt with him and say that he was sexy. In the documentary, Fingles says that he believes the video was removed from the Internet because it was proof of child sexual abuse.

Tiffany also had a very inappropriate fixation on underage Magnus when he was a member of The Squad, according to Fergi’s mother. She says that Tiffany often flirted with Magnus and once asked Magnus, who was 12 or 13 at the time: “Do you have a boner from looking at me?” (Magnus declined to be interviewed or give a comment for the documentary.) Fergi says that off camera, Tiffany and Hill often talked about sex in inappropriate ways in front of the Squad kids.

According to former Squad members interviewed in the documentary, Tiffany engineered the “crush” relationships because she felt that anything that was about the Squad members’ sexuality would get more attention. Piper was paired with Magnus and later with Cameron. Fergi was paired with Ramirez, and she says their romance became real off-camera. Other members of The Squad also were paired up as couples in contrived and phony relationships for “crush” videos, where there was sexual innuendo from kids who were far from the legal age to have sex.

Time and time again in the documentary, Tiffany is described as the chief villain who destroys people’s relationships and self-esteem. Johna Ramirez, the mother of Jentzen Ramirez, says that her marriage with her now-ex-husband and her relationship with Jentzen were ruined because Jentzen and her now-ex-husband took Tiffany’s side when Johna wanted Jentzen to leave The Squad. Jentzen eventually left The Squad in 2023, but his mother says that her relationship with him is still fractured. Fergi says that after she left The Squad in 2021, Jentzen never spoke to her again.

Parents of former Squad members say that Tiffany often pits people against each other by telling lies or exaggerations. People who left The Squad also say that they believe that Tiffany was behind much of the online bullying and hate campaigns that they experienced after leaving The Squad. Connor Cain’s mother Amber Cain says that he’s experienced so much trauma from his experiences with The Squad, he’s given up his dream to become a professional actor. All of the former Squad members interviewed in this documentary say that they are emotionally scarred for life.

Claire Rock Smith says in the documentary, “I have kind of a resentment toward YouTube and social media today. And I think that my passion for it has definitely died down.” She said she had to take a mental-health break from YouTube because of all the online bullying that she got for leaving The Squad and for going public with the abuse allegations. Claire’s mother Ashley says in another part of the documentary that Claire wanted the lawsuit to go to trial so that Claire could give courtroom testimony about what happened to her. Ultimately, the parents of the underage plaintiffs decided to settle the lawsuit to spare their children from the ordeal of a trial and because the lawsuit achieved their goal of getting the abuse information out to the public.

Other people interviewed in the documentary are Internet culture expert Taylor Lorenz; Sarah Adams, founder of Mom.Uncharted, a watchdog forum for child exploitation on the Internet; Brandon Stewart, content strategist/Brandon Studios CEO; Dr. Karen North, clinical professor of communication at the University of Southern California; attorney Jeremiah D. Graham; social media influencer Axel Chico; Chris McCarty, founder/executive director of Quit Clicking Kids; Angela Sharbino and Rob Sharbino, parents of Sawyer Sharbino; former YouTube manager Parker Jones; actor/influencer Ava Michelle; Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Blunt; and attorney Matt Sarelson.

Chico says that he met Piper and her Los Angeles family in 2021, when he went over to their house because he was interested in their stray cats. He appeared in some TikTok videos with Piper, but he was never a member of The Squad. Chico says he noticed that Piper became more withdrawn and depressed off camera, including not eating a lot, especially after the lawsuit was filed.

Chico also observed Piper as being very preoccupied with money. He thinks that she feels a lot of stress and pressure about the money she is expected to earn as a social media star. He also says that Tiffany convinced Piper that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are “mean, evil people wanting her money and wanting to ruin her reputation.” Chico comments that Piper believes everything that Tiffany says. “She’s just programmed that way now,” he adds.

It’s mentioned toward the end of the documentary that Piper is probably the biggest victim of all the controversy because, unlike the other members The Squad, she can’t really get away from her mother as long as Tiffany exerts oppressive control over Piper’s life. Former Squad members say in the documentary that Tiffany has completely brainwashed Piper. It’s also mentioned that the scandals have negatively affected but not ruined Piper’s career.

YouTube de-monetized Piper’s YouTube channel so YouTube no longer pays her anything for the channel. Piper has also been dropped by some (but not all) sponsors. But she still has millions of fans and followers on social media. She now makes money from her videos on Snapchat, TikTok and BrandArmy, which is described as being like OnlyFans but without nudity. Piper turns 18 in 2025, and many people are predicting that she will eventually do nudity in her videos after she becomes of legal age.

Regardless of what happens to Piper, “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” covers similar territory that was in the 2024 docuseries “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” which discussed exploitation and child abuse experienced by former stars of the Nickelodeon TV network. Both documentaries have input from the perspectives of the alleged abuse survivors and their parents and colleagues. However, both documentaries miss the mark when it comes to exposing corporate leaders and their responsibility in enriching the people accused of abuse and exploitation. The cycle of abuse will continue for many people as long as there’s a lot of money to be made from it.

Netflix premiered “Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing” on April 9, 2025.