Gay Girl Gone

What ever happened to some of the first girls to grow up – and blow up – on the internet? In the late 2000s, YouTube gave rise to a new profession: kid-fluencer – kids making content for other kids, earning millions-strong audiences and massive paycheques. And for years, some of the most popular YouTube videos for girls lived on one channel: Seven Super Girls. It featured a rotating cast of tween and teen girls uploading sketches, skits and vlogs daily. Host of Split Screen: There Goes My Childhood, Lauren White was one of them. Over time, they gained billions of views, big-name sponsors, lineups of screaming fans and more money than a child would know what to do with. But with their growing success, came new rules from the man in charge: their manager. He began as a mentor, a kind of father figure. Then, he began dictating how the girls had to look, dress and behave. Above all, they had to look as young as they could for as long as they could. And for years, the girls did as he said… until he was put behind bars for hurting one of their own. Almost a decade after the YouTube empire they built collapsed, the girls are now old enough to tell their own stories for the first time – the fame, the fortune, the friendships and the man they trusted for far too long. About Split Screen: Welcome to Split Screen, an examination of the utterly captivating, sometimes unsettling world of entertainment and pop culture. From reality TV gone awry, to the cult of celebrity, each season of Split Screen takes listeners on an evocative journey inside the world of showbiz. More episodes of There Goes My Childhood are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/TGMCxGGG

The fallout from the revelation about Amina — and others like her — continue to ripple across the world. A furious Sandra wants closure. Danny, living in Damascus, faces a life-threatening decision. And the blog’s loyal readers are left with one persistent question — why?

The shocking truth about Amina finally comes out. Sandra is devastated as the enormity of her new reality starts to sink in. Members of the international media are also scrambling to update their coverage. In Istanbul, Turkish reporter Irem Koker hatches a plan to confront the real Amina.

As forces around the internet unite to try to find Amina, more doubts begin to pile up. Especially when it's revealed that the photos on Gay Girl in Damascus, of a beautiful young woman with chin-length brown hair, belong to another woman entirely.

The unthinkable has finally happened. Amina has been taken by the regime and is missing. In Montreal, Sandra is determined to pull on every lever possible to find Amina. Other journalists and locals are doing the same before it’s too late.