Instagram star Lil Tay’s mother was not fired from the Vancouver real estate brokerage she was working for.
But she’s apparently resigning — after she used her boss’ Mercedes 500 SL in one of the girl’s Instagram videos, without his permission.
Coverage of social media on Globalnews.ca:
Until recently, Angela Tian was working for Pacific Evergreen Realty, a real estate firm with an office at Oakridge Centre on West 41st Avenue.
One of those videos shows her daughter Lil Tay, a foul-mouthed, nine-year-old social media star known for flashing money and a high-priced lifestyle — and using inappropriate racial terms — spouting off in a red Mercedes convertible.
That car belongs to David Yang, the managing partner of Pacific Evergreen Realty.
In an interview with Global News, he said he has two cars: a Bentley and his Mercedes 500 SL.
He said Tian initially came to him and asked whether her daughter and son could take a photo of the Bentley.
Some time later, Yang came into the office and Tian asked him whether he had driven the Bently to work that day. Yang said no, he had driven the Mercedes, but he still said they could take a photo with that car instead.
“But I didn’t realize she was filming for Instagram,” he told Global News.
Once Tian was finished, she said Yang could come and pick up his car.
It would be some time before someone called him and said the car was being used on an Instagram account with almost 2 million followers.
But that wasn’t the only luxury property that Lil Tay accessed thanks to her mother’s connections in real estate.
Another video showed Lil Tay in an apartment, saying her “toilet cost more than your rent.”
That video doesn’t appear on Lil Tay’s Instagram account anymore, but it has been preserved on a fan account:
That apartment was a listing by Pacific Evergreen Realty, where a colleague was apparently holding an open house.
“Everybody got caught by surprise,” Yang said.
Yang said he was “disappointed” and “mad” and felt he was “taken advantage of” because he thought Tian had only arranged to take photos.
Had he known his car would be used for this purpose, he would never have let Tian use it, he said.
READ MORE: This social media star lost 63,000 followers when she started posting body-positive messages
But despite other media reports, he specified that Tian wasn’t fired.
“Apparently she is resigning from the company,” Yang said.
“She called and said I’m quitting from real estate at this point.”
No nine-year-old ever creates videos like these on their own, said Jesse Miller, the founder of Mediated Reality, a North Vancouver-based company that works to educate people about social media influences and concerns.
“There has to be content that is given to the child to act, and what we’re seeing here is a child actor who now has an entirely different stage and in contrast to traditional media where we would see TV or movie stars who are kids,” he told Global News.
Lil Tay’s videos, he said, involve a “parent with a cell phone” making choices about how her kid is noticed on the internet.
Miller worried about how Lil Tay might live with the legacy of her videos when she grows older.
“Is it going to be something she doesn’t really care about because it works in the favour of economics, or is it something that years later we’re going to be looking at this story and saying, ‘look at that poor kid and look what happened 15 years later’?” he asked.
A pint-size girl wearing a jean jacket with the tags still on fans a stack of $100 bills at the camera. She gets in the driver's seat of a red Mercedes-Benz, though her legs are too short to reach the pedals.
"This is why all y'all f----- haters hate me b----," Lil Tay says in a squeaky, prepubescent voice. "This s--- cost me 200,000. I'm only 9 years old. I ain't got no license, but I still drive this sports car b----. Your favorite rapper ain't doing it like Lil Tay."
The video has been viewed more than 9 million times on Instagram alone. It's all typical speech from the preteen provocateur, who has 1.7 million Instagram followers and 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, not to mention starring in other influencer's Snapchats. Her Twitter account was recently shut down.
It's a remarkable feat for anyone — especially considering Lil Tay, at her self-proclaimed age of 9, is too young to have an account on any of these social media platforms. Despite her age and the obviously inappropriate content, she's been able to get verified on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
Due to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 13 is the minimum age to have an account on most social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. Google's YouTube requests users be over 18 but will accept users 13 and older if they have parental consent or if they are an emancipated minor.
But no one really verifies a user's age. They simply ask users to report how old they are — and it's easy to lie.
"Verifying [age] would be hard," said Brendan Gahan, founder of social media marketing agency Epic Signal. "These platforms are concerned about scale, and that [blocking popular young influencers] seems counter to your ability to scale."
Because of lax regulation on social media, no one checks what the owners of underage accounts are doing, how much they are getting paid and how many hours they are working.
"This is an area that clearly needs definition," said Charley Moore, a California attorney and CEO of online legal technology company Rocket Lawyer. "This is an area where adults are clearly getting financial gain."
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