The Journal. - Why Utah Is Regulating Mom Influencers

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Last year, a popular Utah influencer with six children went to prison for child abuse. Now the state has put a new law into place to protect the children in these videos. WSJ’s Zusha Elinson on the Ruby Franke scandal and her daughter’s efforts to keep it from happening again. Further Reading: - A Former Child Star Is Taking On the Dark Side of Utah’s Mommy Bloggers  Further Listening: - The Rise of the Tween Shopper  - Readers Can’t Get Enough of BookTok. Publishers Are Cashing In.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's a corner of social media that's become really popular, and it includes moms in Utah who share their family's day-to-day lives. Here is a day in the life on Lake Powell for a family vacation with my in-laws. So today we are going to be showing you our gender reveal video. Come along with me as I feed the calves at the dairy barn tonight with the kiddos. This whole scene of mom influencers has just exploded in Utah. That's our colleague, Zusha Ellinson. I mean, I don't think there's a place elsewhere in the US where there's more popular family influencers.

How would you describe the kind of content that comes from a lot of the mom influencers in Utah? So it's all about very traditional home life, I would say. So you know, there's videos of people cooking for their kids. Welcome to the Ballion Farm kitchen. Today we are making sourdough bread. Cleaning, gardening, all stuff around the home. I'm just gonna walk you through the products I use

and the methods I use to clean my house. We are all so tired from apple picking today. I don't know. And a lot of these families are enormous. And there's just this incredible fascination across America with the intimate details of these people's home lives. And so these influencers can take that fascination and make money out of it.

Oh, yeah. I mean, this whole thing is a whole money-making venture. Not only do they make money through their advertising on social media, there's a lot of brand partnerships. All of them sell some sort of products that they endorse. It's a very big business. I mean, we talked to people who went from just posting a couple of videos to making their whole family livelihood

on YouTube and Instagram. But Utah's influencer industry is about to change because last week, the state passed a new law that aims to protect the children in these videos. And why is that? I'll tell you why. It's because of a huge scandal involving a woman named Ruby Frankie. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbach. It's Monday, March 31st.

Coming up on the show, the Ruby Frankie scandal and how Utah is trying to stop it from happening again. Okay, flights on Air Canada. How about Prague? Ooh, Paris. Those gardens. Gardens. Amsterdam. Tulip Festival. I see your festival

and raise you a carnival in Venice. Or Bermuda has carnaval. Ooh, colorful. You want colorful. Thailand. Lantern Festival. Boom. Book it. How did we get to Thailand from Prague? Alright, Prague. Oh boy. Choose from a world of destinations, if you can. Air Canada. Nice travels. One of the things that makes these Utah mom influencers popular is where they come from. Utah has a really different image than a lot of states, I would say. They're really proud of their families, and they're really a family-first kind of state. And so I think this whole influencer boom made everyone pretty happy because they're

sort of showcasing the thing they care about the most, and they're making money doing it. A large percentage of Utah's population are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Historically, this Mormon community has encouraged big families, and some women stay home as primary caregivers. Zusha says blogging or influencing has been appealing to a lot of Mormon moms. You know, we talked to people familiar with the whole scene there and they said it sort of fits in nicely with a lot of Mormon traditions.

One is chronicling family life. You know, that's been a longstanding tradition. The other thing is that wives in the Mormon community have long been encouraged to sort of contribute financially to the household from home. There's a lot of multi-level marketing companies out there where women do that kind of work while raising the kids. And this is another avenue where women could stay home and also bring in some money for the family.

What kind of curiosity are these influencers tapping into? So it's twofold. I mean, one is that people are just always curious about the Mormon way of life. It's also tapping into this rising curiosity about so-called trad wives. And these are women who stay home, who dedicate their lives to raising children and homemaking, putting that ahead of a career. One mom who tapped that curiosity is Ruby Franke. About a decade ago, she came on the Utah influencer scene when it was just getting started.

Good morning, passengers. I wanted to share a tip with you that I have learned over the years from being- Mom, I cleaned my room. Oh, good. Can you introduce us to Ruby? Ruby Franke is a mother of six, was married to Kevin Franke, and they were living in small town in Utah when they decided to start a

YouTube channel back in around 2015 or so. And they called it Eight Passengers because of the number of people in their family. And it got really popular very quickly. They grew, but you know, in about five years, they grew to about 2.5 million subscribers, had over a billion views on YouTube. People were fascinated by their home life and how they raised their kids and the family was making a great living off it. To the outside world, it seemed like this picture perfect Mormon family from Utah. What about the kids? Like, what were they like? What about the kids? Like, what were they like? Well, the one we know best is Sherry. She's the oldest daughter. And she had some of the most memorable moments. One particular viral moment was

her mom was waxing her eyebrows and her mom accidentally ripped off half her left eyebrow. Ouch. And the mom sort of was like, oh, I'm so sorry. Sherry's crying. Are you crying? Oh, I see the tears. You're so right. And it, you know, was a viral sensation.

It was like these kind of embarrassing moments that seemed to really attract the attention of viewers. But sometime around 2020, things fell apart. The Picture Perfect Utah family unraveled after one of their sons got on there and casually mentioned that he'd been sleeping on a beanbag chair for seven months in the basement as punishment for being defiant. And this was just sort of mentioned in one of the videos very casually. But viewers grew very alarmed and then they started picking up on other instances of punishment that they thought was cruel and unusual to the kids. other instances of punishment that they thought was cruel and unusual to the kids. Some viewers noticed that after one of the kids forgot their lunch at home, Ruby Franke

refused to bring it to school. And after another viewer set up a Change.org petition, child protective services were called on the Franke family. In 2022, the couple separated. Ruby took the youngest kids and moved in with a therapist, and they started building a new business together. As this was going on, the 8 Passengers YouTube channel was shut down.

And then things got ratcheted up just to an extreme level in 2023 when one of Ruby Frankie's sons escaped a house that she was living in with her new business partner and showed up on the doorstep of a neighbor. He was emaciated, malnourished. He had duct tape around his ankles and his wrists, and he was asking if she could take him to the police station, the nearest police station. Police went to the house and found a second child.

They arrested Ruby Franke and her partner and opened an investigation. Police investigated Ruby Franke and her new business partner and they found that they were really abusing the two youngest kids who were living at this house. They were depriving them of food, they were making them work in the hot sun without shoes, they were beating them. It was just awful, horrific child abuse. Prosecutors said the two women appeared to believe that the abuse was necessary to teach the children how to, quote, properly repent for imagined sins and to cast the evil spirits

out of their bodies. Ms. Frankie, how do you plead to count one aggravated child abuse, a second degree felony? Guilty. Frankie pleaded guilty to four counts of child abuse. Guilty. And to count six aggravated child abuse a second degree felony. With my deepest regret and sorrow for my family

and my children. Guilty. Last year, Ruby Frankie was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. But her daughter, Sherry, wanted to see more protections for other children like her. And she would take that fight to the state capitol. That's next. In January, Ruby Franke's 22-year-old daughter, Sherry, published a memoir.

It's called The House of My Mother. In it, Sherry describes how her mother bribed and coerced her into embarrassing moments. Here's Sherry reading from the book. For me, every video shoot remained a special kind of torture. I can never get used to it or relax. It was like one of those recurring nightmares where you're suddenly naked on a stage With a sea of eyes staring back at you mocking. I mean puberty is brutal enough let alone with an audience What do we see we see all these YouTube and Instagram videos of a happy family?

But what she tells us is what really went on behind the scenes and this is even before the abuse escalated to extreme went on behind the scenes. And this is even before the abuse escalated to extreme levels, right? She had this extreme pressure on herself to just be a good girl and do what her mom said. And she talks about sort of her mental health struggles because of that, the anxiety, depression, all that sort of thing. On top of the actual, you know, performative aspect of it, the constant surveillance of the cameras, there was all these disgusting online comments, you know, performative aspect of it, the constant surveillance of the cameras. There was all these disgusting online comments, you know, people talking about really gross sexual stuff

involving her and other people. I just can't imagine, can you imagine being a teenager being, you know, having to read all this stuff? Or having your friends read it. Yeah, your whole life is out there. In her memoir, Sheri mentions the eyebrow waxing incident and how mortified she was when she saw her reflection in the mirror.

Ruby kept the camera rolling, zooming in on my face like she was documenting a rare species of unibrowed teen in its natural habitat. The money shot, indeed. She talked about one time being very violently ill, and that was another viral video moment. And she said, you know, in retrospect, like the fact that her mom took advantage of that felt really gross, obviously. So all these moments, but the overarching theme was this idea, you know,

she was in a precarious preteen and teenage years during this whole time. And just, you know, she wanted to go through the changes in her life, have her zits, do all this stuff in private, not be plastered all over the internet. After her mother was sentenced last year, Sherry pushed for legislation in Utah. Then, state representative Doug Owens proposed a bill last fall. I spoke to the bill's author, Doug Owens. He talked a lot about how, you know, the Ruby Frankie scandal was an outlier. But I think what emerged from the scandal was sort of the working conditions that these kids have on a regular basis, how their whole life is spent, you know, taking videos and performing for the camera, how they feel this anxiety.

So it really opened the floodgates of what the experience of growing up in an influencer family was like for kids. And I think that really drew the attention of state lawmakers who said we need to protect them. Weren't there any protections for these kids? Yeah, that's the really interesting thing about the story. So you know, child actors in Hollywood, they long have laws to protect their financial interest and protect their working conditions because they're working.

But this is the Wild West right now. There are no protections. And I mean, let's be honest, it's these kids that are making these people popular. And yet they're not being paid, they're not being protected anything. Three other states, California, Illinois and Minnesota, have all passed laws to give more rights to children who appear online. And as this law was gaining traction and being discussed in Utah, what were the other influencers

saying about it? So the influencers in Utah are very quiet about this law. In fact, we contacted a number of family influencer channels to see if they would talk to us. None of them wanted to talk, except for one. One of their representatives got back to us and said, how much would you compensate this mother for the interview? And I had to break it to her that, you know,

we're not in the business of paying people for interviews. So you could see they're all hustling, they're trying to make money. So obviously they don't want that money to stop, right? That's something I'm sure they don't want. But at the same time, these content creators did not take the stand of opposing the bill, which is interesting, right? You could have seen them saying like, absolutely not.

This is going to be a hindrance to a really important industry in Utah. They didn't. I think the Ruby Frankie scandal sort of really caused everyone to pause and take a deep breath and say we do need to do something even if this is how we make our money. Last week, Utah's governor signed the bipartisan bill into law.

What the law says is that if children appear in videos and their parents make more than $150,000 a year off social media, that they have to put some money away in a trust for their kids. Sort of like how child actors are paid. And then the other thing it does is it gives kids the right when they turn 18 to go to court and take down any embarrassing videos that, you know, they don't want on the internet when they're an adult. So this is a really dramatic step in Utah. Utah is a red state, and the legislator there

is very skeptical about intruding into family life with government regulations, with laws. So it's a big surprise that you're seeing regulations of a family activity in Utah. Do you think there will be more states passing laws like this? Yeah, I do because their legislation is proposed in a number of other states. All the states that have passed this law have had no trouble doing so. They think protecting children is pretty uncontroversial.

I think where it'll get interesting is if this gains a lot of momentum and You know whether or not the big social media giants will get involved more. So that's something to watch I know it's something totally different. But like there was a certain age where I stopped posting pictures of my kid on Social media. Yeah, why did you stop doing that? I think it just felt like an intrusion. Yeah. In his life. You know, he doesn't have a say in it.

The voyeurism in social media is, I guess, a little corrosive. Right, you could see both sides of it in this Utah story, right? On the one hand, you see these families who are able to make a living off, you know, the way they raise their kids and this very interesting, authentic life they have out there. You could see that it could be helpful in exposing other people how to raise their own kids.

So there are positives to it that you could see. But when you look at it from the kid's standpoint, I think it's harder to understand those benefits. And Sherry Franke talks a lot about this in her memoir, kids really have no say in the matter. And so to give them a say, she felt was a powerful thing to do. At the end of last year, Sherry Franke posted on Instagram that she was going to get married,

and that it was the end of her sharing her private life. She said she will continue to be an advocate for children. That's all for today, Monday, March 31st. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.