Piper Rockelle is one of the youngest — and most talked-about — social media influencers today, but she’s been in the spotlight for most of her life. Now, with the release of Netflix’s Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, even those who haven’t followed Piper are starting to take notice. How did a teenager rise to such massive success? And how did she end up at the center of this controversy?
Learn more about Piper — and her mom-turned-manager — below.
Piper is a successful influencer, actress, and writer, according to her IMDb profile. With over 6 million followers on Instagram and 14 million on TikTok, the Georgia native has built a powerful online presence.
She began creating short-form content at just 8 years old, starting with Musical.ly in May 2016, where she quickly became one of the platform’s top creators. At a Musical.ly meet-and-greet in Los Angeles that November, a social media manager approached Piper and her mom and encouraged them to launch a YouTube channel.
Piper is currently 17 years old, born on August 21, 2007. Back in February, she marked the milestone by posting on Instagram with gold balloons shaped like the numbers 1 and 7.
According to Netflix’s official logline, the three-part docuseries Bad Influence is an “eye-opening documentary exposé,” in which “teens and parents reveal disturbing accounts of abuse and exploitation within the world of child influencers.”
At the height of Piper’s fame, she was surrounded by a rotating group of friends known as “The Squad”—a collective of young teen content creators who frequently appeared in her videos between 2017 and 2020. Some members even lived with Piper and her mother, Tiffany Smith, in order to produce content more consistently.
