Left to Their Own Devices is brought to you by Children First Canada. In 2002, a 14-year-old named Gislaine Raza went into the basement of his high school in Trois-Riviers, Quebec, and turned on a camera. He had been tasked with making a video for the school's graduating class, a year-in-review kind of thing. The older students wanted to do a stand-up of some of the big movies of the early 2000s, like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Ghislaine was in charge of the special effects, and if they wanted to spoof Star Wars, they'd need lightsabers. But Ghislaine couldn't figure out the lightsaber effect. Every time he tried it, the camera would glitch out. After hours of trial and error, he decided to call it quits. But not before blowing off a little steam. He picked up a pole and started swinging it around enthusiastically, huffing and puffing as he fought off imaginary enemies. He wasn't even a Star Wars nerd. He was just exasperated. And then he turned off the camera and went home. A few months later, another student found the tape. and put it online without Ghislaine's permission. The video tore through the internet. People added sound effects and made remixes. Stephen Colbert and South Park parodied the video on national television. How do they come up with this stuff? Star Wars Kid was the internet's first viral video. It's been seen more than a billion times. As for Ghislaine Raza, he was bullied so badly that he dropped out of school. In some ways, the Star Wars kid is a relic from a bygone era of the internet, before the web was curated by algorithms and social media feeds. But in other ways, it foreshadowed what was to come. Because I think we're all a little bit like Ghislaine Raza now, growing up online, one post away from being in full view of the public. What are you gonna do? Get the fuck out of my fucking face, bro. Oh! Every fight. Shit! Every breakup. There is no easy way to say this, but me and Morgan have broken up. Every romantic misstep. She just got... she just got rejected. Is now playing out in public on the internet. Our most embarrassing moments have become content for other people to consume, to comment on, to laugh at. The strangest part of this is that unlike Ghislaine Raza, a lot of kids today are choosing to live this publicly. So I wanted to find out why. And if our adolescence is now fodder for public consumption, how does that change the experience of being a kid? I'm Ava Smithing from Paradigms and the Toronto Star. This is Left to Their Own Devices. Episode 8, Under the Influence. The idea of posting the most intimate moments of my life online gives me hives. But I think I might be in the minority. According to a report from a polling company called Morning Consult, 57% of Gen Zs say they want to be influencers, a job that literally revolves around turning your life into content. How many followers do you have now? Let's see. On TikTok, I have 5.9 million. I have a hard time wrapping my head around this. I'm fucking shook. I'm part of my friend. No, you're good. So I wanted to talk to someone who does it for a living to see if I could put myself in their shoes. I always get nervous, though, kind of like talking on certain things. While I was in Los Angeles, which might be the influencer capital of the world, I met up with an 18-year-old named Sophie Fergie. I've never really loved the word influencer, but I would say that, like, I am considered an influencer. I just don't love the word influencer just because there's so much negativity. And I think people think of influencers as jokes. I like to consider myself a person who posts, I guess. A person who posts. A person who's active on social media. We are going to Universal Horror Nights, guys, and I am so scared. Sophie has basically spent half of her life online. In the first video I ever made, I want to say it was 9 or 10. I'm really scared. Are you scared, Dan? Bookity, bookity, bookity, bookity. This video is from 2018. Sophie's in that cute, awkward phase when your adult teeth first start going in. It was just really my mom kind of filming me going through horror night's mazes and kind of sharing that experience. And it was just fun for me, like little vlogs that I would do. Sophie, my husband. Oh my God, that was so, that was so scary. I really liked at that age, like, having a camera in my face. One day, I just, like, started to get the hang of it. Hey, guys, so we did everything. We did the Purge. We did the Blumphouse. It was awesome. I hope you guys enjoyed watching me get terrified. Kids did enjoy watching Sophie get terrified. And apparently, they also liked watching Sophie do pretty much anything. to anything. So today we are going to be doing My BFF Reacts to My Fashion Nova! Trying on clothes. I'm going to be reacting to her fashion nova clothes. I'm super excited. Describing her skincare routine. Once I'm done, look at all that makeup, guys. Disgusting. Talking through her breakups. And I sorry that I ended up like this I didn want to say goodbye like this I really did Sophie was 12 in that one It got nearly 4 million views I was bullied in school, so not a lot of people liked me. So it was cool that strangers I didn't know liked me. It was like, oh, this is fun. All of you guys like me, we're all friends. For older generations that grew up idolizing pop stars and Hollywood actors, Sophie's popularity might be kind of baffling. She doesn't dance or sing. or tell jokes. She's just her. But for kids her age, Sophie is a pop star. Posting videos of her life is now Sophie's full-time job. Personally, I can't imagine living so publicly, but hearing her talk about it, I'm starting to see the appeal. She has financial independence, flexible hours, and a real sense that she's bringing joy into other people's lives. People are like, oh my God, like we can like relate to you. I'm like growing up with you and I think that's what makes it so special. And a lot of people have grown up with me since like 10. But living your life in the public eye isn't always easy. If you're putting yourself on social media, you have to realize that you are putting yourself out there. And you don't need to be an influencer to know that the internet can be vicious. Even when you're 12. I think it started to be non-validating when I started to get hate, because I was like, what? I just got away from the bullies and they're back already. Like, what is happening? Kids and adults began leaving nasty comments on Sophie's videos. I don't think people realize how much words can really affect somebody. It's hard to imagine someone walking up to a 12-year-old girl on the street and mocking her appearance. Yet somehow on social media, it's become totally normal. I think with the comments that got me the most were mainly about my lips, because I have like pretty paper-thin lips, whatever. What about it? I blame my parents, but it's fine. But I think those comments just got to me so, so, so much. I don't really know why, because at the end of the day, my lips don't define who I am as a person. But those definitely made me think twice and made me really question, like, oh, maybe if I changed, I'm like, I'd be cuter. Today's a big day. It's Sophie Berge turning 18. What's the first thing you do when you turn 18? Get lip filler. It's LA. It's the first thing you do. It's a vicious cycle. Sophie was mocked for her appearance online and then took steps to make herself more conventionally attractive. And I don't fault her for that. I think if I were in her shoes, I might do the exact same thing. But in turn, Sophie's fans, girls as young as seven or eight, probably see Sophie and aspire to those same conventional beauty standards. Now, a lot of you guys have been asking me for a lip tutorial, so I decided why not. This may be why we now have Sephora tweens. 11-year-old girls who spend hundreds of dollars on skincare and makeup because that's what the influencers are doing. Hey girls, how much are you going to spend in Sephora today? $15. $90. $188. $188. Boys aren't immune to these pressures either. Okay, this is a legendary video. They've started looks maxing. I'm going to be showing you how to combine thumb pulling and chin tucking to develop your maxilla, give you the best jaw you can get, trim your neck and change your entire face. In smell maxing, Here's how to be the best smelling man in any room. Which basically just means buying expensive cologne. For winter, I'd recommend cheap one would be in half a hundred p.m. Really nice. And a little bit expensive, not expensive, like $82, like $130 is our most one to perform. They're both amazing for winter. Some people see these trends as a sign that young people are becoming more narcissistic. Obsessed with their personal brand and the way they're perceived both on and offline. Social media was something that pulled for that attention-seeking. And you got that narcissism there of, you know, look at me. I have this many followers. And here's all of my pictures and so on. This is a psychologist named Gene Twenge in conversation with Jordan Peterson. But then when social media became more mandatory and everybody's participating, well, not everybody can get attention. So then it becomes this competition. So it, I think at that point, became less about narcissism for most people and more about not measuring up. Look, I get it. I was never a Sephora kid, but I did lurk in the beauty section of Target. And I can remember obsessing over how I looked on social media. So I don't want to sound like a total boomer, but I don't know if I want to live in a world where 11-year-old girls think they need a full face of makeup before they leave the house, or want cosmetic surgery the moment they turn 18. Unrealistic beauty standards aren't new, but social media has turbocharged them and introduced them to kids at younger and younger ages. What is that doing to childhood? Kids have been left to their own devices long enough. Children are growing up in a digital world that was never designed with their safety in mind. They are bullied, groomed, extorted, and exploited online. Every single day. Children First Canada is demanding a safe digital world for all our children. Through trusted research, bold advocacy, and youth empowerment, they're working to make Canada the best place in the world for kids to grow up. But they can't do it alone. Visit childrenfirstcanada.org and join the countdown for kids today. It's hard not to see the rise of Sephora kids and looks maxers as a sign of the end times. A depressing reminder that we live in a culture that is singularly preoccupied with the way we look, especially on the internet. And it easy to lay that at the feet of influencers After all they the ones peddling products to these kids But as I spent more time in the world of influencers I started to realize there might be another side to this story I think there's a few reasons people are dismissive of the influencer industry. This is an industry that was built by women, LGBTQ people, marginalized people. And so it made it really easy to dismiss because people dismiss those voices all the time. This is Taylor Lorenz. She's a journalist and the author of Extremely Online, the untold story of fame, influence, and power on the internet. So I've covered the influencer industry for, gosh, a little over 15 years now. I started as a blogger and content creator myself, and I wanted to write about what I saw as the real digital media revolution. Taylor doesn't think the influencer industry is built on vanity. She says the fact that we have influencers at all is actually kind of revolutionary. So back at the turn of the millennium, you started to see the rise of blogs. And you started to see basically people with absolutely no institutional power or access start to affect the real world. In the early 2000s, few communities were as exclusive as the world of New York socialites. Think Paris Hilton and Ivanka Trump. And I write about this blog called Socialite Rank, which started ranking these socialites and publishing information about them online and sort of upending the entire social cultural order of New York City among these socialites. Socialite Rank was a big deal at the time. And in some ways, it was a predecessor to the worst parts of social media. We all sort of have become these socialites where we put ourselves online, we curate these images of ourselves, we build these sort of personas, and we get 24-7 feedback on these public personas that we've created for ourselves through social media. But socialite rank did something else too. It gave people access to an exclusive world they were otherwise shut out of. Everyone assumed, oh, the only person with this level of access and knowledge of our parties was another socialite. when it turns out who was behind this blog, in fact, it was two random Russian immigrants. Early bloggers were essentially the first influencers. And many of them were women who struggled to be heard in the real world. And they used the internet to find their voice. So mothers were also really early internet adopters. And you can't talk about the early internet without talking about the mommy bloggers. At the time, the media ecosystem was incredibly misogynistic. I went back and read a bunch of old women's magazines from the early 2000s, and it was shocking. You know, they were presenting this really regressive view of motherhood. These internet moms started to challenge that view. And it resonated. You had these moms basically turn to blogging to say things like, hey, this is my experience of motherhood, and it doesn't jive with what I'm seeing in traditional media. Does anyone else feel this way? It was a real feminist act that these women were doing. They were really sort of challenging social norms. It's hard to overstate how significant this was. For the entire 20th century, information always flowed from the top down. Whoever ran the TV networks and the radio stations decided what we heard, who we heard it from, and when we heard it. Now, all of a sudden, here was a way for anyone and everyone to have a voice, without some guy in a suit deciding if that voice mattered or not. People like to push this idea to young people that, oh, before the internet, before you had all this information, Like, it was great. No, it wasn't. It was actual hell for so many people, especially women and marginalized people. It was terrible. You had a media environment where you weren't represented, where you had no ability to connect with people immediately outside your geographic area. And there was so much injustice that was basically swept under the rug. Like, young people had no voice. A great example of this, and bear with me here, is Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who became embroiled in a sex scandal with then-president Bill Clinton. Sources say the tapes include Lewinsky's graphic descriptions of a long-term sexual relationship she allegedly had with Mr. Clinton. With hindsight, I think most people now would agree that Lewinsky was a victim. Welcome to The Tonight Show. Nice to have you. And happy Monica Day, everybody. Today is Monica Day. But that's not how figures like Jay Leno portrayed her in 1988. And Monica's book is coming out tomorrow. Good, I'd like to read that. Oh, sure. In fact, she did a book signing today. Actually, even the book signing, she does a little different. Here she is signing some of the books. There she is under the desk there. Hearing that now makes my skin crawl. But what if Lewinsky didn't need the media to tell her story? What if, back then, she could have just gone on TikTok and told people directly? She had no voice to speak out, no voice to tell her story. Now she's been very vindicated and through really using the internet to take back her voice. Taylor says this is the thing that makes the internet so great. The ability to give voice to the voiceless, to democratize speech and bypass the gatekeepers. And if you know where to look, there are plenty of young influencers doing this today. Hey, politicians! Like Little Miss Flynn. Flynn needs our water back. Do your job! Or Valerish. I'm Ukrainian, and it's awful to see how the youngest, most beautiful, are killed by Putin. Or Yaqeen Haman, an 11-year-old Palestinian girl who showed the world what it was like to live under Israeli occupation... until she was killed back in May. We'll be here for you. Gaza is not possible. All young women and girls using social media to tell their stories, to draw attention to critical perspectives that the mainstream media so often overlooks. That wouldn't have been possible two decades ago. Just ask Monica Lewinsky. At this point you may be thinking okay sure There are obviously some influencers using their platform for good But aren most of them just doing goofy dance routines and makeup tutorials Well, maybe. But I also think the line between activist and lifestyle influencer may be blurrier than we think. Do you think you have influence? I would hope so. Even though most of Sophie Fergie's content probably falls in the lighthearted fun category, She can also get pretty deep. I always kind of knew that I had, like, maybe a little bit of influence, but after I released this podcast episode with a few friends of mine... What about it? Should we eat candy? Yeah, let's make a candy salad. Let's make a candy salad. I talked about a story of mine. Yeah, that's exactly what we're going to do. Sophie and a few friends have a podcast called Girl Talk. In one episode, Sophie talked about her experience with The Squad, a group of popular tween influencers. Oh, God, I don't like those guys. When I was 11 years old, I was, um, I don't even know how to explain this. Okay, when I was 11 years old, the lady that I lived with, not a family member, but the lady that I lived with, like, did stuff to me. And I brought jelly beans. Back then, Sophie was best friends with Piper Raquel, the main star of the squad. So today, I'm going to be doing a sleepover with my friend Piper. Come on in! In 2022, Sophie and the other members of the squad sued Piper's mom, who was the group's de facto manager. In the lawsuit, they alleged that they experienced, quote, emotional, verbal, physical, and at times, sexual abuse at the hands of Piper's mom. The suit was settled for $1.85 million, with no admission of wrongdoing. That alleged abuse is what Sophie talked about on her podcast on an episode called Consent. And I think a lot of people felt comfortable to open up about their stories in Consent. I mean, like, I had people DMing me, like, wow, I'm very inspired by you, and I'm going to go talk out and speak out about what's been happening at home, which is very moving to me. That's so important to me that, like, if you're going through something, that I could help you kind of feel more comfortable to talk about it. See what I mean? This whole thing is complicated. Some influencers use their platform to sell eyeliner, and some use it to talk about important social issues. And sometimes, they use it to do both. And the only reason someone like Sophie has an audience in the first place is because she spent years making goofy videos, pranking her friends, trying on clothes, and yes, doing makeup tutorials. It's hard to square all of this because we also have research showing that social media tends to be bad for kids' self-esteem and encourages girls to sexualize themselves. It's hard to make sense of a technology that is simultaneously deeply empowering and incredibly toxic. It's not because of the platforms. Taylor Lorenz says it's a mistake to think of this as an internet problem. Let's not forget that social media gave us the entire body positivity movement. And I wish that some of these people that are having these panics could look at the 90s and the 2000s, because that was the only content that was available. That is all you were exposed to. There was no alternative. You know, the internet is downstream from culture, and so it sort of holds a mirror to culture, and our culture is regressing. As for the idea that we're living through a golden age of narcissism, well, Taylor says we might be misunderstanding why kids want to be influencers in the first place. Most of them actually are very uncomfortable with fame and don't like fame and actually have a really hard time with attention. But when you talk to them, they want security. This seems to resonate with Sophie. I've watched, you know, people work their ass off for, you know, like not great pay. And I just, I think I am so blessed to be where I am. They want economic security. And they've seen that that can be had through the internet. And so they put themselves on the internet and they commoditize their lives. And I think it's dystopian, ultimately. It's just like it's this like hyper-capitalist version of the influencer world that's, I just think it's kind of dark. Like what is more capitalist than commodifying your very self and every aspect of your life? If Taylor's right, that kids are selling themselves online because it's the only path they see to economic stability and the only way they can be heard. Well, maybe that's more dystopian than the technology itself. Next time on Left to Their Own Devices. And it made me so withdrawn from literally everyone. Like, I wouldn't talk to people or I wouldn't go out and hang out with my friends because I literally just wanted to sit in my room all day and watch porn. I think every day was a rock bottom. You know, every day was like, oh, today's going to be the day that I don't watch porn. I'm 15, 16, 17, and I just can't get out of it. This is not something fringe. This is not something that some kids are doing sometimes or bad kids are doing. This is something that your kid is probably doing on the regular, every day, in your house. Left to Their Own Devices is hosted and produced by me, Ava Smithing. The show is written and produced by Mitchell Stewart. This episode was also written by Debbie Pacheco. Mixing and sound design by Reza Daya. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldhar. The executive producers for Paradigms are James Millward, Helen Hayes, Taylor Owen, and Mitchell Stewart. The executive producer for the Toronto Star is J.P. Fozo. If you want early access to upcoming episodes of Left to Their Own Devices, subscribe to the Toronto Star at thestar.com. Bye.
