A brand new documentary has landed on Netflix. Starting April 9th, 2025, the documentary about the mother of a famous YouTuber/influencer that goes by the name of Piper Rockelle, Tiffany Smith, called Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing. Tiffany has been accused of child abuse.
Piper Rockelle has been on social media since 2016 when she was eight years old. She started making content on YouTube for the kid audience between the ages of six-to-ten years old. Her YouTube videos would consist of many different challenges with her friends for example videos like last to leave the pool wins. Early in her YouTube career, you would never suspect anything; it just looks like kids trying to have fun.
One of Piper’s first friends she had when she started her YouTube career was Gavin Magnus. Five years ago he came out with a video that is titled “the TRUTH about our Break Up…” in this video he comes out with the truth about working with Piper and her mother.
He states that the environment was very toxic, abusive, unhealthy and that he did not have fun at all. He also talks about how those were the most stressful times of his life. Gavin states that Tiffany would have anxiety attacks and start saying things and phrases to scare the kids.
Gavin compares Tiffany’s actions to almost what an ex-girlfriend would do or say. Tiffany would yell at him, call him names, and many other things to disrespect him. Gavin says that once she even offered him a vape, then he continued to answer questions from his audience.
There are teens that were victims of said “kidfluencing” that are confirmed to be in this documentary like Sophie Fergi, Claire Rocksmith, and Corine Joy.
But not all victims of kidfluencing are supporting the documentary. One of the victims, Jentzen Ramirez, came out with a TikTok talking about the documentary:
“I’m sorry but a lot of this doesn’t make sense to me. If we are all so traumatized why are we making a documentary to just relive it all. Personally I just wanted to forget and move on with my life.”
Clearly he thinks the documentary was not a good idea and in one of his comments he says:
“How would you feel if someone took the worst thing to ever happen to you and brought it to the biggest streaming platform for the world to see.”
After all of this information from the TikTok we can tell that he just wanted to forget about that his traumatic experiences in kidfluencing even happened and move on with life.
A lot of Piper’s old fans that have now grown up are all very interested to watch this documentary because they grew up watching her videos. They all believed that there was no bad or harm going on behind the scenes.
People say that Piper herself is a victim of her own mother because her mom exposed her to the Internet at such a young age. Finding all of this information out years later was shocking to her fans but some even say that there were signs from the very beginning of Piper’s career.
Many people have been waiting and waiting for this documentary to come out since it was first rumored to come out. Many teens can’t wait to learn about the darkside of their childhood YouTubers. Some even say that their whole childhood was a bunch of lies because of this and hope this is one of the only cases that are like this.
At the time of writing, Piper is still 17 and has said that once she turns 18 she will say the truth about everything. All other victims featured in the documentary are now 18.