A very blatant example of ‘bad behavior’ in the online space would be of a famous youtuber, Eugenia Cooney. Eugenia Cooney is a twenty eight year old American woman who runs a YouTube account where she posts makeup tutorials, outfit hauls, trying on new clothes and testing products for her predominantly preteen/teenage girl audience. Something that had always stood out about her was how thin she has always been, in the beginning of her career she was fairly skinny, but as the years went on she slowly lost more and more weight. This never appeared extremely concerning until she drastically lost weight through 2018. Her viewers begged her to get help, but she refused, until in February 2019 her friends staged an intervention for her, ending with her going into hiatus and checking into a hospital, to then a rehabilitation center. She spent several months in rehab and away from social media. A lot of theories went on while she had been gone, one being that she may have died BECAUSE of how bad her disorder had gotten. When she returned, she did several interviews with other youtubers talking about her experiences regarding rehab, mentioning her struggles with eating disorders and her goals to become better, not only for herself but for her audience. This interview helped her damaged reputation heal, people began to see her in a new light as she expressed her want to change. She kept up to this promise for the beginning months online, but after being back for a while things soon turned for the worst. She started losing weight in a drastic amount of time again, began posting herself in smaller and smaller outfits as she lost more and more weight. She would go on streams and attempt to lift small objects to show her viewers how weak she had gotten. She would go on Instagram and compared her thinning body to skeleton props. Her influence online had and has become detrimental, with challenges to try to look like her resurfacing on and off within young, preteen girls. People on streams will explain to her how her influence on her audience is damaging, how she corrupts younger boys and girls into believing that how she acts and what she is doing to her body is okay, but she has expressed over and over that she simply does not care.

A lesson we can learn from what has happened with Eugenia Cooney is to be aware of the influence you leave, the damage you can do to those that look up to you. To try to leave a positive impact on those around you.