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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Arwa Mahdawi

As kidfluencers come of age, we need to consider the consequences of viral fame

Claire Hope AKA Lil Tay.
Claire Hope AKA Lil Tay, far from the only young person dealing with the ramifications of online fame. Photograph: Lil Tay/Instagram

Rumours of Lil Tay’s death were greatly exaggerated

As it turns out, Lil Tay is not dead. Which is great, anyone who isn’t extremely young or Extremely Online, might respond, but I had no idea this person was alive in the first place. What on earth is a Lil Tay?

That was certainly what I thought a couple of days ago when Lil Tay’s death and subsequent not-death made headlines. For anyone in a similar state of bewilderment: Lil Tay, who also goes by the names Clare Hope and Tay Tian, is a 15-year-old internet personality and rapper who shot to fame in 2018. What made her famous? Videos in which the baby-faced rapper flaunted large wads of cash and went on outrageous foul-mouthed rants. Shock value, basically. After her 15 minutes of fame, during which she amassed millions of followers, Lil Tay disappeared from the internet and spotlight.

On Wednesday, after five years of silence, Lil Tay returned in the most disturbing way possible: an unsigned statement posted on her Instagram account announced that she had died a “sudden and tragic” death. It also added, in what seemed like an afterthought, that her older brother had died.

Since Lil Tay’s entire online persona was based on shock value, some people immediately wondered whether the announcement of her death might be a hoax. It was. On Thursday, TMZ reported that the viral star was alive and, according to a statement from her family, her Instagram account was “compromised by a third party”. Interestingly, her father and former manager, Christopher Hope, hadn’t said anything about a hack the day before. Instead he’d refused to confirm or deny her death. It’s impossible to say what exactly happened but you can certainly see why there is rampant speculation that this was an attention-seeking stunt rather than a third-party hack.

Did Lil Tay want to be famous? Did she want to be thrust into the spotlight when she was just nine years old? It’s unclear. The rapper went dark in 2018 for a number of reasons including the fact that a video was leaked in which her older brother, Jason – who was 16 at the time – seemed to be coaching her on what to say. Questions about how much Lil Tay was being strong-armed into making content began to swirl – allegations which the family vehemently denied. “No one’s forcing me to do this,” the young star said in a 2018 Nightline interview.

No one might have been holding a gun to Lil Tay’s head demanding that she make videos, but her family certainly didn’t seem shy about monetizing her newfound fame. In 2018, for example, “‘Lil Tay’” was trademarked by the “parent and legal guardian of Claire Eileen Qi Hope” for use on everything from meme images to knit face masks. Lil Tay may not have been forced to turn herself into clickable content at the age of ten, but her family enabled it. They certainly didn’t stop it. Nor did anyone who was supposed to be safeguarding Lil Tay seem to really consider the long-term consequences of viral fame on a child. “Lil Tay is homeschooled now because, even though she had 2 million followers for only two months, she’s too famous,” the Cut said in a recent in-depth profile of the influencer.

Lil Tay is far from the only young person dealing with the ramifications of online fame. Teen Vogue recently ran a sad piece profiling a YouTube star who went viral as a toddler and the resentment “Claire” (her pseudonym in the piece) now feels towards the family who treated her childhood as monetizable content and pressured her into performing. “Once, [Claire] told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore,” Teen Vogue notes, “and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for ‘nice things’”

We’ve now reached the point where the first generation of online kidfluencers are coming of age and starting to speak out about how the monetization of their childhoods has affected them. Lil Tay may be alive, but questions should be asked about her well-being.

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