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‘Absolutely heartbreaking’: The dark side of family vlogging

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'Absolutely heartbreaking': The dark side of family vlogging

Yon May 2020, parent vloggers Myka and James Stauffer tearfully revealed to their nearly 1 million followers that the son they adopted from China just three years earlier had been “rehomed.” The boy, Huxley, who was only five years old at the time and living with autism, had been the star of many YouTube videos sharing the joys, struggles and brand associations of the Stauffer family. But in the month leading up to that May 2020 upload, titled “an update on our family,” followers noticed that it had been phased out, that old videos featuring Huxley had been removed, and that comments from followers who questions about her whereabouts were quickly deleted, while Myka continued posting housework videos.

After the Stauffers came clean, the backlash was (unsurprisingly) swift and relentless, criticizing the family, which includes four other biological children, for exploiting Huxley for clicks and views, packaging his adoptee trauma into a content, before deciding that they were ultimately ill-equipped to meet her needs (“I apologize for being so naïve,” read a statement from Myka). However, the Internet’s response, much of which tilted furiously not only toward critical commentary but also toward wild conspiracy theories aimed at getting even more clicks and views, turned into on-chain content perhaps as cowardly and predatory as the inciting behavior.

An Update on Our Family, a three-part documentary series airing on HBO, revisits the Stauffer family saga but with more nuance, empathy and insight than the Internet typically offers, while attempting to avoid the opportunism behind some of negative reactions. “I didn’t want to do exactly the same thing as everyone else,” says director Rachel Mason over Zoom. “And yet, here we are, doing the same thing as everyone else. “We are talking about this story.”

Mason is taking the call from his home in Los Angeles, which he returned to after a brief evacuation due to the recent wildfires. The director is currently producing a documentary about her close friend, the late Halyna Hutchins. The cinematographer was accidentally and tragically killed while filming the movie Rust by a bullet accidentally left in a prop gun fired by Alec Baldwin. Mason says he can’t share any details about that documentary at this time. Although I wonder if it’s on your mind when we talk about responsible filmmaking, when it comes to telling Stauffer’s story. “I have other projects where I constantly have to ask myself, ‘Hey, is this crossover into exploitation what I don’t want to exploit,'” Mason says. “It’s really fundamental to the ethical control that I think is required when making a documentary.”

Mason refers to the productive arguments he has resisted while making An Update on Our Family, trying to stay away from the “lewd” and “scandalous” narrative that the media and the Internet would often succumb to when “cannibalizing” human tragedy. That’s a monumental challenge when your own series is built from algorithm-induced scraps. The series features the disturbing material uploaded by the Stauffers and those who flocked to their orbit, and in the meantime is tasked with keeping audiences engaged with investigative flourishes and cliffhangers that wouldn’t be out of place in a true crime.

“At the center of all of this is an absolutely heartbreaking story, involving children,” Mason says, “and children who never deserve to be put on the public stage. When there is a horrible, horrible tragedy – whatever it may be – and there is controversy, please, let’s try to protect the children; Not just the boy who worries everyone, Huxley, but the other boys too.”

For the most part, the children are blurred when they appear in An Update on Our Family, which offers a panoramic view not only of the Stauffers saga but of the entire landscape of family vlogging implicated in their tragedy. The series features powerfully emotional voices who have experience as adopters and adoptees and faced shared struggles with both the Stauffers and Huxley, whose tragedy was horribly compounded because much of it played out on public channels.

“I wanted those people who felt like they could be direct portals to this experience,” Mason says. She points to one of her subjects, Hanna Choan influencer who herself was adopted, as the ideal presenter to tell this story. “She could help you identify how it feels, what it’s like, when your fans want something. “I could talk about the feeling of disappointment, of falling in love with the Stauffers and also seeing their adoption story in a positive way.”

Cho, along with other vloggers and influencers, appears in the series chronicling how we got to this point, where technological advances in home video intersect with the latest evolution in reality television (from Candid Camera to The Kardashians), fostering a lucrative cottage industry. . for intimate, healthy-care content that comes straight from the average person’s kitchens and laundromats.

“Are people who turn their families into television bad people?” Mason asks, recalling an industry that took shape in the ’70s with the PBS series An American Family. “What I began to recognize is that, as one of our great contestants on the series said, people are fascinated with families, they always have been.”

Myka and James Stauffer. Photography: Youtube

Among the talking heads of her series, Mason turned to YouTube expert Sean Cannell to gauge the demand for family vlogs and bring real analysis to the Myka Stauffer story, which seems to have started innocently enough. She was a seemingly genuine single mother who shared her life online. Then she got married, started having more children, and probably would have noticed, as Cannell did, the huge increases in views and subscribers every time someone was added to her family. Many online assumed that increases in online metrics provided the impetus to embrace Huxley, a cynical but not unwarranted attitude that may also be dismissive of the countless other complicated emotions that An Update on Our Family goes through.

There’s something about Stauffer’s story that resonates with all of us who have shared our children’s photos online. We may be just a few hundred thousand more likes and followers away from rewiring our brains as parents, serving our children, and fueling audience engagement. “I’d be involved too,” Mason says. “I have a son. I think the word “involved” is funny, because I also think it’s a human condition. We want to share our children. And it’s not inherently bad.”

Then he asks: “Is there a distinction to be made with people who lean into content and suddenly have an audience to feed? These are not bad people at all. These are people who have also stumbled upon something. You’re tripping over something. And all of a sudden, ‘Wow, hey, the business took off and we’re catching up.’ Many people have come across it and are catching up. And as they catch up to you, there are times when you might have to pause.”

What makes Mason doubt is that family vlogging has become an industry that rivals reality shows in terms of viewership, but without many of the regulations and protections that shows made by networks usually offer. “There’s a team of story producers,” he says, referring to reality TV. “There are other producers. There are editors. There are a lot of things that can happen before it airs. YouTubers are producing content with a very similar audience base. Some of these people have fan bases that are equal to or larger than the Kardashians. And you are not protected by a network or a production company. “You are really vulnerable.”

There are more disturbing stories that emerged from the so-called “family channels” since the Stauffers. They range from people like Jordan Cheyenne training her son’s real tears for his sick dog to be ready in miniature, as seen in an accidentally posted YouTube clip, to Ruby Franke, a popular mom vlogger convicted of child abuse. Franke’s eldest daughter Shari is currently speaking out about her horrific experience while promoting her memoir, House of My Mother, her story being an extreme result of the family channel industry.

Mason hoped to include other voices in An Update on Our Family who grew up as stars on their parents’ YouTube channels and could speak to that experience. “But guess what,” he says. “They weren’t old enough.” She adds that since filming wrapped, others, like Shari, have come of age and are beginning to share their stories. “The bottom line is learning from these people,” Mason says. “We live in an unknown space.”

One voice you will be relieved not to know is that of Huxley, who, in the last update to the public, was left in the care of a family better suited to meet his needs. Mason makes it the structuring absence in An Update on Our Family. It appears in many of Myka and James’ videos, which are reused here, not with the blur applied to other children to protect their privacy, but as a void filled with rotoscoped animation, using leftover sketch-like brush strokes to add meaning. of his humanity.

“With Huxley, he had a story that needed to be told,” Mason says. “It was important to give it an anthropomorphic character… When it appears, it is like a ghostly presence. He is still obscured. But you can feel the presence of a real person, a real character going through a journey.”

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