A Momfluencer’s Son Drowned. Now Other Parents Are Rethinking How Much They Share Online

On Sunday, three-year-old Trigg Kiser died following a drowning incident. According to local NBC affiliate 12 News, authorities responded to a call in Chandler, Arizona, where they found the boy unconscious after being pulled out of a pool. The child was airlifted to Phoenix Children’s Hospital. The circumstances of the drowning are unknown; an investigation is underway. “Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the child’s family and loved ones during this unimaginable time,” said Chandler Police spokesperson Sonu Wasu in a statement. 

Trigg was the son of Emilie Kiser, a 26-year-old Arizona-based mom and beauty influencer who has 3.6 million TikTok followers and 1.4 million Instagram followers. (Neither Kiser nor her representatives have issued a statement, and they didn’t respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.) When the drowning incident happened on May 12, it was reported on local Arizona news channels and the outside of the house was shown. Viewers recognized it as belonging to Kiser. Almost immediately, TikTok was ablaze with rumors that the boy who had drowned was Kiser’s son. People posted videos comparing footage from the news report to Zillow listings of Kaiser’s house, insisting that the boy who drowned must have been her son. There were tearful videos where creators prayed for Trigg’s well-being and others where people redoubled their investigative efforts to prove that Trigg was the boy who had drowned. TikTok creators pointed to the fact that Kiser (and many of her close friends who are also influencers) hadn’t posted in days.

Kiser is among the most popular mom creators on TikTok and has welcomed millions of fans into her family’s life. Trigg was a regular staple in Kiser’s content, as Emilie showed footage of her getting the young boy ready for the day, playing with him, or putting him down for a nap. Through her daily vlogs, viewers came to feel that they knew her. More than that, some of them felt they loved her — and loved her children. This isn’t uncommon for parasocial relationships, which are defined as one-way relationships fans develop with celebrities or influencers. The ones viewers form with mom creators can be particularly intense, according to Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University. “She’s walking you through her life. It’s super intimate. It feels like you’re spending the morning with your best friend,” Rauchberg says. 

Parasocial grief

On Monday, news reports confirmed that Trigg had died. Seemingly instantaneously, online sleuths dug for proof of the boy’s death, even going as far as posting screenshots from the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner confirming his death. That didn’t surprise Brandon Harris, a professor of social media analytics and production at the University of Alabama who studies parasocial relationships. “For better or worse, these content creators are public figures and celebrities at this point,” he says. “We can debate the limit of what the expectation of privacy should be but they have primarily made their wealth by making their lives accessible to other people.” And fans seem to expect that access even in the wake of unimaginable tragedy. 

There was also an outpouring of grief on social media, as viewers and fans struggled to understand the death of a boy with whom they had formed such a parasocial bond. They had watched Trigg grow up, their videos and captions lamented, and now he was gone. Creators posted videos of themselves sobbing onto the camera. One video with hundreds of thousands of views offered the Kiser family a place to stay if they wanted to leave Arizona. Another account, which has now been deleted, posed as Emilie posting a tribute to her late son. “Social media collapses the distance between viewers and the person on the other side of the screen. The tragedy becomes so much more than just a family’s grief or a community’s grief when millions of people are now grieving with you,” Rauchberg says. “And that’s not always a good thing. We don’t actually know this family.” 

Alongside the expressions of grief, creators and commenters threw blame and accusations. They insisted Emilie and her husband, Brady, should be charged with child neglect. An unsubstantiated rumor that Emilie refused to have a pool fence installed because it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing has been often repeated. People zoomed into old videos of Kiser’s, trying to prove that she did or didn’t have safety measures in place. They looked through her content, trying to pinpoint where she was when the drowning incident occurred. Had she been home? Was she out? Was she at fault or was her husband? In a video viewed over 200,000 times, a creator who goes by @neurodivergent_nate said, “this is parental neglect. You’re the parent and you need to be protecting them. And you failed.” 

The TikTok videos addressing the Kaiser family tragedy largely fall into two categories: grieving Trigg or blaming his parents for his death. The intensity of the reactions leave Rauchberg wondering whether the intense parasocial reaction to Trigg’s death may change the culture of parents sharing content about their kids online. “Let’s say I’m an influencer and, God forbid, something happens to my kid, do I want people making content about my child and getting views and clicks and likes because my child died?” 

Mom influencers rethink sharing

Losing a child is a tragedy; losing a child in front of millions of people who think they know is a dystopian nightmare — and it’s making mom influencers rethink what they’re sharing online. One mom creator posted a TikTok of herself overlaid with the words, “Anyone else questioning how much of their life they share online after seeing Emilie Kiser get ripped apart by the internet?” In another video, a creator who posts about being a mom in law school said, “I just want you guys to know this will be the last public video from me. The things that I’ve seen after someone going through the worst thing imaginable are vile and disgusting and I don’t wanna share my life. I don’t wanna share my kids.” Rolling Stone reached out to this creator, who said she had nothing to add to what she said in the video.

A mom creator who has hundreds of thousands of followers, and requested to remain anonymous because of possible backlash, tells Rolling Stone that she was stunned by the lack of sensitivity of viewers and fans. “People watch creators on the internet and they don’t realize that they’re real people with real lives and real families outside of what they see on the internet,” she says.

Because of the response to the Kiser family tragedy, this creator is taking a break from posting on social media and is even debating quitting altogether despite the benefits from an influencing career. “Having a following can be a creative outlet and a monetary blessing for sure, but the cost is your privacy and your peace. No amount of money is worth that. The money you can make from social media is not worth this. Everything that happens to you, good or bad, will be dissected by the internet. Nothing is worth your privacy and your peace.”