Fresh Reads: Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi
There is something quietly radical about a journalist who turns her most pressing obsession—the thing that keeps her up at night, filling spreadsheets and firing off emails at 2 a.m.—into a book that asks the rest of us to pay closer attention. Fortesa Latifi is that journalist, and her debut book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online is one of those rare works that manages to be both impeccably researched and deeply, uncomfortably human. It asks a question most of us have scrolled past without stopping: what does it actually cost a child to grow up as content?
Fortesa wrote this book during one of the most disorienting seasons a person can move through—early motherhood. She had survived a brutal pregnancy, marked by hyperemesis gravidarum that left her physically depleted and emotionally unmoored, followed by a traumatic birth and the strange dissociation that can come postpartum, that feeling of existing purely as a body serving another body. And yet, a few weeks after her C-section, laptop balanced on the couch beside her newborn, she started writing again. Not because she was ignoring her recovery, but because work was how she found herself. It was how she remembered she was a person with a mind and a voice and a story worth telling. That kind of radical self-recovery—the kind that looks a little impractical from the outside—is woven into every page of this book.
Like, Follow, Subscribe dives deep into the world of mom influencers, family vloggers, and child content creators, interviewing the parents who run these accounts, the experts who study them, and the children who grew up inside them. What Fortesa found—that the content performing best often features kids at their saddest, sickest, or most vulnerable—is the kind of discovery that lands differently once you're a mother yourself. This book is for anyone who has ever paused on a family vlog and felt something they couldn't name—a little uncomfortable, a little complicit, a little curious. It is for the woman who has wondered whether the internet's hunger for authenticity is actually just hunger, full stop. And it is for anyone standing at a crossroads in their own life, looking for proof that the most important work sometimes begins in the middle of the hardest season.