I’ve been thinking about this too and honestly, Ruby Realname can sit in her bedroom dressed as Miss Havisham, eat tiny meals and twirl round the garden until the world ends, if she wants. It makes no difference to me at all and she’s free to do whatever she wants to do. However, I do have a huge problem with ‘Ruby Granger’ promoting EDs online, especially as she absolutely knows the demographic of her audience and how damaging her behaviour could be - or to be fair, she would have known at one point but may now be in a position where it no longer registers.
StudyTubers (and YouTube celebrities more generally) weren’t a thing when I was at school but if they had been, I can totally see myself as part of the audience because on the surface, the life they present would have had everything I wanted as a teenager - a nice, stable home, two parents, academic success, good schools and so on. I would have saved up and bought a planner from Ruby and a narna t-shirt from Holly. Hell, I probably would have saved and signed up to one of Jade’s scams, sorry, schemes, because I would not have had the critical faculty at that age to separate the image from the reality. I would have thought that by buying their stuff, I could be like them. It is not a huge leap to see myself deciding that copying them in other ways too would be a good idea, so that I too could get good grades and have a nice, middle-class life.
There aren’t any StudyTubers that aren’t problematic - just from the ones I ‘know’, Jade‘s a raging narcissist caught up in her family’s MLM lifestyle to the point where she’s even decided to go to an MLM university, Ruby’s clearly unwell mentally and now that she is facing real life, everything’s falling apart and Holly’s most likely done permanent damage to her body through years of disordered eating. But they are able to present themselves as people to look up to and their audience (well, the chunk of it that isn’t middle-aged perverts interested in school dresses and young women’s periods) laps that up. It’s all part of the problem of making teenagers, influencers. When you get to the point where someone feels that they know you and trusts you enough to do what you do and buy what you recommend, you can’t turn that on and off like a tap. If you influence me to buy a lipstick, or a laptop, then all of your other behaviours will influence me too. This is what the StudyTubers need to realise.