Bonnie Blue’s baby outrage – and the dangers of our extreme attention economy | Arwa Mahdawi

Bonnie Blue has made millions of pounds by having sex with thousands of men. I suppose that last part isn’t particularly unusual for a sex worker; it’s basically the job description. But Blue has reached an unusual level of fame for the profession through grotesque stunts such as having sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours and preying on young men with “barely legal” content and university “bang bus” tours. She’s notorious enough that she was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary last year.

In short, Blue (real name: Tia Billinger), possesses two of the most important qualities for financial success in the modern world: shamelessness and a keen understanding that you’ve often got to go to extremes to cut through in today’s attention economy. She is exploiting the idea that it is profitable to “enrage to engage”: the business model baked into every social media algorithm.

Now it seems that Blue, who gave birth to her first child (father unconfirmed) last month, is carrying that enrage-to-engage ethos into motherhood. She has been sharing postpartum content with her subscribers and recently escalated to posting a video where she is holding a baby and is surrounded by men in balaclavas while promoting her sexual content. It is unclear if it’s actually her baby or a doll in the video but, either way, it’s disturbing. So much so that it’s even got me agreeing with the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, for perhaps the first time ever. Speaking to Sky News last week, Badenoch said that the video was a “safeguarding issue”. She added that while it is tempting to ignore the whole disgusting affair, doing so risks “normalising babies in porn adverts”.

In response, Blue sent Sky News a statement insisting “my baby is loved, protected, and incredibly well cared for”. Blue may love her baby but there is obviously nothing protective about using your child to entice people to watch you perform sexual acts. Clearly there should be an investigation into this child’s welfare.

While she has taken it to a dangerous extreme, Blue isn’t the only parent to be recklessly using their child as a prop on social media to make a buck. There are endless family influencers who share intimate details of their kids’ lives and splash their images all over the internet without their informed consent. Then there are all the budding “momagers” who run Instagram accounts for their young girls, hoping it will lead to a modelling or influencer career down the line. In 2024, the New York Times analysed 5,000 mum-run accounts of young girls and found that while “men accounted for about 35% of the audience overall”, many large accounts with “more than 100,000 followers had a male audience of over 75%”.

The NYT also documented many instances of grown men sending explicit messages to these underage accounts or reposting pictures, with “even some egregious violations [leading] to no action by Meta”. Which isn’t surprising when you look at the company’s history. In a July 2020 internal chat, which was made public in court documents, one employee asked what the company was doing about child grooming. Another replied: “Child safety is an explicit non-goal this half.” Gotta concentrate on ramping up profits so Mark Zuckerberg can build a bigger bunker! Instagram has since instituted more content guardrails for child safety but still faces questions about whether it could do more.

Blue is obviously incredibly problematic. But the broader problem here is that the digital economy, with its warped incentive structures, rewards this sort of depraved and extreme behaviour. And while shamelessness can now be a lucrative career path, the traditional route to a comfortable middle-class life has been destroyed. The UK has seen more than a decade of wage stagnation while house prices and the cost of living have rocketed. The job market is grim, particularly for new graduates. AI, if it doesn’t kill us all, is going to make everything worse. It’s no wonder so many people want to be influencers, and no wonder so many people will chase online fame no matter how low they have to stoop to achieve it. Blue’s latest stunt is obscene, but so too is this brave new world the tech bros have forged. It feels as if we’re all screwed.