ALT It should be yet another good lesson for anyone trying to make money through content creation: brand deals will sometimes come back to bite you. And it’s often the individual content creator — not the advertiser — that gets the most heat while having the least amount of support resources. The incentives to make ads for brands have never been higher. Fueled by breakaway stars like MrBeast, the D’Amelio sisters, and Alix Earle, young people the world over don’t just dream of creating a viral presence out of nothing — many of them live it. Acting like an influencer is so easy it doesn’t even feel like pretending; shilling products and services online to a following of a few hundred has become a tenant of being online.

ALT When brand deals go awry, it’s often the individual influencer who becomes the center of the maelstrom, as was the case with the Shein image rehab trip and others. Last month, a different influencer came under fire for referencing a school shooting that happened at her university in a sponsored video for skincare company Bioré. The brand apologized, too, saying it reviews all influencer content but doesn’t “edit or censor” material creators submit. I’m less outraged that a young person who experienced a campus shooting would mention it when asked to create content about mental health. But if you work in marketing for a major brand and don’t see how this could cause problems for everyone involved, you are bad at your job. Content creators are responsible for what they put their name on, but it’s up to the brand to make sure they don’t look like a fool. Even worse is when a brand partners with an influencer and throws them to the wolves when there’s a public response, as was the case w