Like, Follow, Subscribe by Fortesa Latifi

A searing investigation into the child influencer industry and the perils of childhood internet fame, Like, Follow, Subscribe is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the costs of internet fame, and the ethics of online content.

What is it like to grow up with a camera in your face 24/7? To have your childhood moments sold as “content” to millions online? What happens when someone who works in a largely unregulated multi-billion-dollar industry sells away their childhood and has no financial safety net as an adult? What does it feel like to have your private moments—your medical diagnoses, your first period, your first break up, your tantrums, potty-training, and breastfeeding-weaning—broadcast to an audience of millions? Like, Follow, Subscribe shines a spotlight on the deeply troubling world of the child influencer industry.

Journalist Fortesa Latifi dives into the lives of children whose parents mine their everyday activities for monetizable content, exposing issues like privacy violations, financial abuse, and the absence of child labor protections. Through expert interviews with psychologists, labor scientists, and even former child influencers and family vloggers, she uncovers the pressures, trauma, and consequences for children thrust into the spotlight.

This timely and eye-opening book doesn’t just reveal the harm of toxic social media culture: it also provides a roadmap to better regulating influencer families, safeguarding children, and questioning the role of audiences in perpetuating these cycles of exploitation.

Why I Picked It Up

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As a journalist, I have plenty of writers I casually like but only two or three that I really fangirl over—in that I'll read a piece of phenomenal reporting, check the byline, and realize of course it's theirs. I find everything they touch fascinating.

Fortesa Latifi is that person. Since first reading her work in Rolling Stone or Teen Vogue or Cosmo, I've been hooked on her reporting—topics, the way she interviews, her commentary, how she structures the delivery of information, how she links each piece to a broader umbrella or prism. I relish the feel of having a sense for what fits her voice or interests. (I think back to a few years ago when everyone wanted to "curate"; I love when someone has a specific taste or style in their proportions, and that goes for beats too.)

Her lane—the effects of the influencer ecosystem on children, for example—intersects with so many cultural issues and sensations that her work always sends my brain churning. It's the definition of illuminating the universal through the specific, which is a value of writing I won't shut up about. Each of her pieces is thorough, sharp, engrossing, and empathetic—spanning enough to send me spinning, but focused enough to feel clear.

In other words, I just think the world of how she writes, so I'd been looking forward to this book for ages. I bought it immediately.

About the Book

In the last years, influencing has grown into an industry worth over $250 billion, exacerbating the issues first appearing in TLC reality shows and family YouTube channels in the early 2000s. Families—according to Latifi—are the highest lane of earners within the creator space (especially in affiliate link structures) because their lifestyles actually touch every product category. Now, we're seeing the first wave of protective legislation attempts or visible effects on the children who were initially commodified when these platforms hit critical mass.

Each chapter of Like, Follow, Subscribe touches a different angle of the family content issue—from the economics to the religious roots (Mormonism) to the right to privacy. There were so many rabbit holes to go down because the lifestyle element blurs the line so heavily.

Does the presence of a camera fundamentally alter an environment? Does our modern panopticon culture flatten personalities into performances to the extent you can no longer analyze what's even "authentic" in the first place? There's a whole lot of nature vs. nurture involved obviously when you're comparing modes of the self—which I think about a lot from the identical twin angle—and public vs. private is one of those captivating splits. (For example, I recently have discussed with a friend how I think a problem of the book space is that a certain segment of readers treats characters like real people and real people as characters.) Will any given kid really know what life would have been otherwise?

In the same way that How to Be Multiple points out how twins can be a mirror to singletons analyzing their own individuality and autonomy, Like, Follow, Subscribe shows how family influencers force followers to grapple with their own positions on labor and exploitation, childhood, privacy vs. visibility, authenticity vs. performance, etc. What's the purpose of that content to both the creators and their audience? What happens when an influencer chooses to take their kids offline, or sees the numbers surrounding a negative depiction? (For example: content where kids are sick or hurt vastly outperforms other topics, which is an awful statistic to know that sours you on the entire possibility of there even being a right way.)

Does a little one's enthusiasm to participate—or their financial compensation—in any way allow them to consent to giving up their privacy? But what about people posting to a small circle who then blow up—should they delete their old content? What about the kids who grew up posting to social media at all, regardless of parental input? So many good questions come out of this conversation, many of which everyone is dealing with now in some form or another.

Over the last few years, I've thought a lot about the science of growth, and the stability that audience then provides you. The mechanism relies on stoking a parasocial relationship. Many authors and journalists have struggled with that awareness as "content creation" becomes a mandatory duty in the job, whether in-house or freelance, and the influencer children conversation is an avenue that forces all the ethical considerations and trades baked into that exchange right to the surface.

Voice, Tone, Style

What I appreciate about Latifi's approach too is that she highlights domains that have been so helpful to make public i.e. stigma around miscarriages or the resentment of uneven labor workloads, and she breaks down concepts that otherwise get flattened like how content creation can structurally make sense as a career for mothers because it layers over their existing responsibilities and schedule. (The layerability of it is both the blessing and the curse of a family creator; some boundaries exist for a reason.) She considers written vs. video content, staged content vs. intimate moments captured, etc.

She's very clear about when, within a conversation, a source may have clammed up or decided the conversation was heading in a way they didn't like; she mentions who she reached out to and who didn't respond.

Fortesa Latifi originally wrote Like, Follow, Subscribe while pregnant, worked on more for it while postpartum, and marketed it while pregnant with her second. (She just had that baby—congratulations!) She peppers in her own emotions where helpful or illustrative of the communal elements of the depiction of motherhood, or to coax out certain questions that came to mind during her reporting, and articulates those shifts or moments without overpowering the facts.

Throughout it all, she does an excellent job making conversations multifaceted and dynamic, exploring how some considerations aren't black-and-white, and even how some attempts to institute protections within the space are unenforceable against the sheer force of its economic and cultural impact. I know where I land, and Latifi ultimately shares where she does too, but there's plenty to jump off of from either end and she does a great job grounding it in the sociopolitical context of motherhood in this economy. Like with everything else, the family element makes it all messier.

Overall Thoughts

I think often about a quote I read once—I believe from The Nature Fix by Florence Williams—about how human beings are generally pretty good at deciding what's good or bad for us, but are terrible about determining how much of something makes it either. Content about families does serve a purpose and can make others feel less alone, but any production involving children—one like this which penetrates their existing life and childhood in a way you can't walk back—is a slippery slope.

Several people Latifi interviewed admitted entirely to the exploitation factor and calculations, and she captured the dissonance of their justifications—as well as repeated patterns among interviews—brilliantly.

Like, Follow, Subscribe captures a cultural moment like none other. It's well-organized, fascinating, and occasionally horrifying. I would definitely recommend, but I'd also consider your timing or readiness if thinking through some of the negative impacts to children will really get to you. The worst examples can absolutely be heavy.

So good. Just so good. It's one of those books that I could dissect for ages from various angles. For any book clubs seeking nonfiction, Like, Follow, Subscribe would be an excellent pick. I'm so glad it lived up to my expectations, but I was pretty confident it would.

For fans of:

Having It All by Corinne Low; Bad Blood by John Carreyrou; Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke; Bachelor Nation by Amy Kaufman; The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt; Cultish by Amanda Montell; etc.