Happy 10th bday to my beautiful daughter!! @alabamaluellabarker I love u so much! I can't believe your ten! 💝🦄👸🏼❤️🎁🎉 pic.twitter.com/afn5MghDBm
— Shanna Moakler (@ShannaMoakler) December 24, 2015
Shanna Moakler’s 10 year-old daughter, Alabama Barker, used to have an open Instagram account where she posted selfies, things she was interested in, and group shots with her friends. Alabama was on Instagram from the age of nine, and in many shots she’s wearing heavy makeup. (In case you’re wondering who this is, Alabama is the daughter of Shanna and her ex-husband, Travis Barker of Blink-182. They had a reality show together from 2005-2006, after which they predictably broke up got back together then broke up again. Shanna is a former beauty queen who has been in a lot of beefs with other celebrities and has made some very dumb public statements.)
Last month, a YouTube personality named RiceGum made a video about Alabama, stating that he was looking for kids who were too young to be on social media, essentially. RiceGum, who is 19, used to call out a 13 year-old YouTube personality named Jacob Sartorius, whom he ended up meeting and befriending. So he made a video called “The Next Jacob Santorius” in which he used photos and posts from Alabama Barker’s open Instagram. RiceGum pointed out the very adult posts that Alabama was making. She was posting selfies and a lot of information about her day-to-day activities from the age of nine. You can watch the video here. Despite what Shanna tells Life & Style, the video is still public. It wasn’t mean so much as obnoxious, which seemed to be RiceGum’s style, and drawing unnecessary attention to a minor. To be fair to RiceGum, Alabama already had 75,000 followers and her parents are famous so it’s not like he was finding an obscure young person on Instagram. He was pointing out that that Alabama was too young to be posting such personal things to social media. He also noted that Alabama had posted about seeing an R-rated movie, 22 Jump Street, when she would have been nine. RiceGum made it clear that Alabama was violating Instagram’s terms of use, which dictate that users have to be 13 years or older to use it.
Anyway that’s background for this claim that Shanna made to Life and Style about her daughter being cyberbullied and her life being threatened:
In an exclusive interview, former Miss USA and Meet the Barkers star Shanna Moakler opens up about her 10-year-old daughter Alabama’s scary experience with cyberbullying.
Shanna tells Life & Style that it all began when a popular YouTube personality known as RiceGum, 19, posted a video taunting Alabama for her precocious pics, vegan lifestyle and inconsistent grammar.
Within hours of the video going up, more than 3,000 commenters had posted hateful and repulsive remarks calling the pre-teen a “loser,” “whore” and worse.
“My daughter read a lot of this vicious bullying and started crying,” says the 41-year-old. “We had to explain to her that she was safe and these threats were from people who didn’t know her. It has been so emotionally draining and damaging that I now understand why people commit suicide over cyberbullying.”
Shanna explains that she asked YouTube to take down the video (the company did, citing copyright infringement) and called out RiceGum for picking on a minor. “I told him how wrong this was,” the mother-of-three shares.
However, that only made things worse. Commenters claimed they would work together to “find and kill” her and Travis Barker. “People get obsessive and nuts,” she says. “It’s scary.”
“There’s been nonstop harassment,” Shanna continues. “People think they can say anything because they are faceless, but their comments cause a lot of pain.”
Shanna is determined to help put an end to cyberbullying. “I want to make a documentary about this,” she says. “I want to travel the country and talk to school principals to help stop this in the future.”
No one should have to deal with death threats. No one should be called names or have to deal with mocking or bullying online. That needs to stop. At the same time, it is absolutely the job of the parents to keep their kids off open social media like Instagram until they are old enough for it. That was RiceGum’s point and while I think this girl was too young to be publicly called out, he wasn’t particularly mean or mocking, that was all the YouTube commenters, who can be vicious. (Although I looked through the comments that were at the top and I didn’t see one bullying comment among them.) Alabama’s Instagram is now private and I don’t want to blame the victim in any way. How were her parents letting her go on Instagram at the age of nine? That is a parenting fail. Maybe she could be on Facebook, monitored and with a select group of friends, but she’s not even a teenager and she was on Instagram. The story that Shanna is telling Life & Style leaves out a lot of key details. Travis Barker used to brag about how many followers his kids have. Shanna is right though, the trolling and bullying on YouTube, Twitter and other social networks is out of control and these companies need to get a handle on it.
My beautiful daughter @alabamaluellabarker she's coming for you Taylor and Selena! 👸🏼 pic.twitter.com/4WeBwrPYJD
— Shanna Moakler (@ShannaMoakler) March 10, 2016
Frontpage image credit: PRPhotos
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