On Feb. 13, JoJo Siwa posted a YouTube video from a Target store, detailing her plan to buy “every single item of JoJo merch” inside. She starts with clothes, piling her own trademarked shirts and dresses into a cart. “I literally got one of everything I could find!” Siwa says to the camera. “Now, let's go see if they’ve got toys.”
Siwa encapsulates many of the things that made YouTube the world’s most-watched video site. She dances, sings and screams excitedly into the camera, drawing millions of viewers, mostly young girls. The 15-year-old kidfluencer also highlights how YouTube’s success with children has created an ethical and perhaps even legal minefield for its owner, Alphabet Inc.’s Google.