The Ruby Franke doc proves that social media was a mistake

Folks, I love you all.

I’m very happy and grateful that you read the nonsense I post here every week. It’s both humbling and motivating. But social media was a mistake.

I’m fortunate for the connections I’ve made. I’ve met some of my closest friends through Facebook, and before that, LiveJournal. But social media was a mistake.

I appreciate the convenience, the access to up-to-the-minute news, and being able to hear from people I wouldn’t have access to in my everyday life.

But still, social media was a mistake.

I could provide a long list of why social media has done far more harm than good. However, I don’t want this thing to be accused of being “too political” (whatever the fuck that means, everything is political), so I’ll ignore some of the more obvious ones in favor of Ruby Franke, the subject of Hulu’s new documentary Devil in the Family.

On the most basic level, Ruby Franke is practically a true crime cliche at this point, yet another woman whose “perfect mom” facade masked a sociopath with a sadistic streak that she worked out on her kids. It’s the story behind it that’s baffling, infuriating, and tragic, and says nothing good about the current state of humanity, and what social media has collectively done to our brains. If you’re smart and believe that things are bleak enough already, you don’t have to watch the documentary: Vulture provided a pretty thorough breakdown of it. The Cliffs Notes version is that Franke and her husband started a family vlog, which somehow became successful despite it being an increasingly crowded industry, and then Franke became obsessed with growing their “brand,” filming and posting every aspect of her family’s life, and demanding that her reluctant children participate in it, beating them if they refused.

The Frankes eventually lost their audience and endorsement deals when it was revealed that they forced their teenage son to sleep on a beanbag chair for nine months straight. After that, Franke became friends with a self-proclaimed “life coach” (another scourge of social media) named Jodi Hildebrandt, and had some sort of psychotic break, moving Hildebrandt into her house and forcing her husband (who comes off in the documentary as the most useless sack of shit you’ve ever seen in your life) to move out. Sharing Hildebrandt’s delusion that demons walked the earth, Franke began regularly abusing her younger children, even documenting it, apparently believing that they were possessed. She’s thankfully now in prison.

Obviously, this is all horrifying, and Hulu lays it out in gruesome detail. There are plenty of well-written articles (here’s one right here!) about the ethics of family vlogging, and making every single potentially embarrassing, should-be-private moment of our children’s lives available for public consumption (while at the same time stoking paranoia about the boogeyman pedophile supposedly hiding in every Target bathroom). We all have at least one unflattering childhood photo we don’t want anyone to see, the kind our mothers used to threaten to show to our dates. Now imagine that expanded into hours and hours of video, online, forever. What kind of people do that, without their children’s express consent?

But neither ask an important question: what kind of people watch that?

We used to joke about the nightmare of being stuck in someone’s home and forced to watch home videos of their vacation. Now we do it willingly, with strangers, even rewarding them with gifts and money in the hopes that they’ll post more. Why?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy looking at photos and videos of my friends’ families (though vacation videos are pushing it). But the operative word there is friends. I even accept the lure of watching videos of celebrities just hanging out at home and pretending they’re normal people. But watching videos of strangers getting their kids ready for school in the morning, eating Thanksgiving dinner, going grocery shopping? That’s fucking weird, man.

I can accept one thin, blonde, toothily grinning, almost certainly Mormon1 wife and mother of anywhere from four to eight children being made into a minor internet celebrity, but there are dozens, hundreds of them out there, infesting YouTube and TikTok, all of them with a devoted fan base. When the Hulu documentary describes Ruby Franke’s teenage son as a “fan favorite,” my blood curdled. What does this mean, in this context, that grown adults want and demand to see more of a teenage boy just trying to live a normal life? What in the world is the draw of watching videos with titles like “Abby Gets BRACES!” and “Chad’s 14th Birthday Party!” when you don’t even know these people?

“Abby Gets BRACES!” currently has 173,000 views on YouTube. That’s fucking weird, man.

As mentioned above, there’s almost certainly a significant overlap between fans of family vlogs, and people who genuinely believe that the world has become so overrun with perverts and degenerates that it’s not safe to let a child walk even three blocks to school alone anymore. Where you would think it expanded our worldview, instead social media has isolated us and made us suspicious of our own real-life neighbors. If you need an example of this, try Googling “Twitter chili lady,” and have yourself an eye-opening “what has happened to our critical thinking” read.

But sure, it’s not weird or creepy at all to watch a video of a family announcing that their daughter has gotten her first period. That’s not fucking weird at all.

One of Robin Williams’s best performances was in One Hour Photo (2002), in which he plays Sy Parrish, a desperately lonely, emotionally disturbed photo counter technician who gets pathologically attached to a customer’s family. Sy feels like he’s gotten to know them through developing hundreds of photos of holiday and birthday celebrations, vacations, and fun outings. He even makes duplicates of the photos to keep for himself, so that he can feel like part of the family, and as if he was really there.

In 2002, this was considered sad and sinister, and that’s even before things got violent. In 2025, lucrative income is being made from people like Sy Parrish, lonely and desperate to feel like part of a family. Parasocial relationships are the engine that runs social media, whether it’s people who feel entitled to have a say over who Taylor Swift dates, or people checking YouTube every morning to see if their favorite family (who they don’t actually know, and in return has no idea they exist) has posted another video about going to back to school shopping at Wal-Mart. It seems harmless, on a surface level.

But then you have Heather “Dooce” Armstrong, arguably the first thin, blonde, Mormon (albeit no longer practicing) mommy blogger, whose oversharing drew her both passionate fans, and passionate haters, inspired and repelled by her spare-no-detail approach to writing about her (and her husband, and her children’s) life. Many of those fans turned against Armstrong when she and her husband eventually divorced, feeling betrayed because apparently she had spared a detail or two. Armstrong admitted later that her marriage had been in trouble for years, and that she had kept it hidden lest it impact her “brand” (the fact that her husband had also become her employee almost certainly didn’t help).

Nevertheless, she was criticized by fans who now believed they had “wasted their time” on reading about her life, while others begged her to work things out with her husband, as if a blogger getting divorced had any sort of meaningful impact on their own lives.

Can’t emphasize enough, that’s really fucking weird.

Armstrong, who had also been open about her lifelong battle with depression (which met with accusations of being a narcissist), committed suicide in 2023. By that point, her glory days as the “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers” were behind her, thanks largely to both the rise of vloggers, and her unforgivable sin of not being entirely upfront with strangers about her problems. I don’t want to say that if Armstrong had back to 2004 and elected not to share everything about her life online maybe she’d still be alive. But I don’t imagine that the constant accusations of narcissism and being a bad mother, the gleefulness when it all started falling apart, and fans dropping her because they felt “betrayed” by something that was none of their business, helped her general state of mind.

I also don’t want to say that social media made Ruby Franke into a child abuser. I am saying that the Frankes’ audience needs to take some ownership of what happened. “She didn’t have to put herself out there,” you might say. “She didn’t have to exploit her family.” You’re right, she didn’t. We didn’t have to look at it either. But we did, over and over, whether it was because we genuinely enjoyed it or to make fun of it, it didn’t matter, a click is a click. We watched the Frankes and every family like them, the Inghams, the Norrises, the Dougherty Dozen, the LaBrants, the Tanners, just to name a few, many of whom have also been accused of mistreating their children because it made for good #content. There’s no point in worrying about #content if you don’t have an audience for it, and it’s us. We have to own that, and accept that it’s very fucking weird.

We need to start figuring out what the draw is to this overproduced, allegedly “wholesome” entertainment made for people who watched The Truman Show and thought “hey, that seems like a good idea.” We must look into why we regard these people as parenting experts, and take advice from them on what cleaning products to buy. We must acknowledge that something happened within the past 20 years that’s left a hole in us that can only be filled by watching strangers throw birthday parties and celebrate Christmas morning and pretending they’re our families too.