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The Sad Ballad of Miranda Sings

Who is Colleen Ballinger, aka Miranda Sings?

YouTube Creators are no strangers to controversy. The latest and one of the most strange ones is the sad ballad of Colleen Ballinger, otherwise known as Miranda Sings. You might be seeing some headlines accusing her of grooming, but who is she?

Here are the top 5 things to help parents understand what they can do to guard their kids against her very specific brand of (allegedly) parasocial relationships. 

1. Colleen Ballinger rose to fame around the age of 21 when she created the character Miranda Sings and got popular on YouTube, leading to tv spots and live tours in character. Miranda Sings is a character based on theater kids and young singers who would upload videos of themselves singing to YouTube – but Ballinger uses Miranda to make fun of them. That’s how Miranda Sings was born. 

2. As an adult at 21 years old, Ballinger used to direct message her fans and fostered relationships with them, who thought they had close relationships with their idol. One of the more notorious group chats was called “The Weenies.”  Adam McIntyre, who was in the Weenies group chat, was one of her biggest fans and published a video in 2020 which said that Colleen Ballinger had allegedly groomed him to basically be her best friend. She also hired him as a social media intern and talked about what a great opportunity it was. After McIntyre published this video three years ago, he proceeded to receive tons of backlash from her loyal fans.

3. Why is this in the news now? On June 3rd, 2023, Kodee Tyler, another YouTube creator, posted a video that explained how Colleen was behind most of the harassment of McIntyre back in 2020. He got doxxed– which means that they published his private address and information, allowing anyone to send threats to this teenager (at the time). Tyler also rightfully received a lot of backlash for her apology video, but she gets into that in her video description.

4. After Tyler’s video came out, a barrage of other former fans said they allegedly experienced harassment, fat shaming at meet and greets, and inappropriate direct messages. It has also been revealed that she allegedly direct messaged at least one minor– McIntyre– an OnlyFans picture of another YouTuber who was one of Ballinger’s friends and co-hosts of a podcast. You can check the laws of each state here to learn the legalities of sending nude pictures to a minor.

5. Ukelele Gate: You probably didn’t hear about her ukulele apology because there was no actual apology in there. Here is a link to a playlist with the best critique of her response video that I could find. Please watch these if you’re interested; don’t give her channel the views. Yes, she monetized her attempt at an apology video.

What’s a parasocial relationship and how can parents shield their kids? 

One of her claims in the video is that you can’t find her content on the YouTube Kids app. Here is just one example of many examples I have seen where you clearly can. 

The allegations against Ballinger show a slightly skewed example of what is called a parasocial relationship, a phrase you’ll hear often when learning about YouTubers and content creators in general.

“Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence.”

National Register of Health Service Psychologists

I say it’s skewed because in most of the alleged cases we’re hearing, it was not a one-sided relationship, and in fact was allegedly nurtured by Ballinger herself. 

“I’m not a Groomer, Just a Loser”

Yes, she actually sang that lyric. You might wonder why people are calling her a groomer when none of the allegations include performing sexual acts with a minor. Grooming can be described as:

Grooming allows offenders to slowly overcome natural boundaries long before sexual abuse occurs. On the surface, grooming a child can look like a close relationship between the offending adult, the targeted child and (potentially) the child’s caregivers. The grooming process is often misleading because the offender may be well-known or highly regarded in the community. As a result, it’s easy to trust them.

Darkness to Light: End Child Sexual Abuse

The lawyer who runs a YouTube channel called “Legal Bytes” explains in her video that it doesn’t quite fit the legal criteria of grooming, because there doesn’t appear to be “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” 

However, what McIntyre describes is an odd merging of parasocial relationships and grooming. I found a good definition by a YouTube commentary channel that fits the description of what these former fans are experiencing:

“These are individuals realizing that an adult they trusted acted inappropriately towards them for years when they were children, taking advantage of the massive power imbalance between adult celebrity and child fan.” 

FunkyFrogBait

According to the allegations, Ballinger allegedly groomed her underage fans to….be her closest friends? In her first apology video three years ago, she called it “oversharing.” Even without a sexual act involved or anything physical at all, any adult should know better and not confide in multiple underage children about her divorce. Grooming does not need to have sexual intentions.

Full stop. When talking to your children about the dangers of grooming, please include examples of when an adult might groom them but it doesn’t end in any kind of physical touch. If they flatter a child, fulfill an emotional need, isolate them, and maintain control over the child in some way, it can be considered grooming. Full stop. 

“I’ve always relied on parents to decide if they’re comfortable”

By the end of her video, after blaming all the victims and saying she was taking accountability with no accountability taken…after that, she said something that all families with fans in their house need to hear.

From her ukulele video:

Uh, I also wanted to take a minute to talk about that girl, Miranda Sings

You know the one, yeah, her?

Uh, she’s PG-13, it says that on my website

And it’s always been that way

And that’s why you won’t find my videos on the YouTube Kids app

Anyway, um, I didn’t realize it was my responsibility

To decide what was appropriate for every kid to see

I’ve always relied on parents to decide if they’re comfortable

With their families watching my YouTube videos or coming to my live shows

So. After blaming all the kids for so long, she threw it back to the parents. Why leave us out of it, anyway? I want to address this part, because McIntyre, the main person at the center of the alleged victims – his parents, and specifically his mother, was involved. I am not trying to place blame on her, because from what we know, she did everything she could. She tried to monitor his fandom and make sure that he was being responsible. McIntyre himself tells us in his videos how she checked his social media and acted as a buffer when she could.  

Now, often when parents monitor their child’s social media, the kids get around it by creating a separate account so their parents don’t see those messages. And that’s what McIntyre did, like any typical teenager; so his parents wouldn’t know. His mother Sinead was still often the barrier between McIntyre’s fandom and Colleen’s consistent boundary-crossing. In fact, one of the major points where Ballinger allegedly crossed a line was by sending (again, an underage) McIntyre lingerie that she was sent from a company. He didn’t even know about it for a while because his mom intercepted the package and hid it from him. Given their recent activities on Instagram, it looks like she’s a source of strength for McIntyre at this time. He has thanked her multiple times on social media for her support. 

What Can Parents Learn from McIntyre’s Story?

What we should learn from this is that we have to be the safe space for kids to be able to go to you and say, “Hey, I know I’m not supposed to be direct messaging with this person, but I have concerns and I need your help.”

Please be their safe space. So if something is icky, or they’re not sure how they feel about a message or content or anything, your kids can come to you without punishment, because you opened up the lines of communication for social media, for YouTube, for TikTok, Snapchat– whatever they’re exploring. I wrote more about that here. 

The best thing that we can do is open up the lines of honest communication, show those lines to our kids, and have it be a two-way street so that they can tell us how they feel. We can then give our feedback, but also ask how they’re feeling about it. Why do they like certain things? How can we help? And come to some sort of family agreement.

So that’s Colleen Ballinger and the Miranda Sings controversy, in a nutshell. Part of the reason why it’s taken so long for me to speak out about this is because every single time I wanted to, more information was uncovered. And it wasn’t until I heard her blame the parents too, did I know if I had anything new to say on the topic.

Thank you so much for reading, and it’s my pleasure to watch hours of YouTube so you don’t have to.

Photo/Image Credit: Canva

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