Ukuleles and grooming accusations: Inside the YouTube scandal dividing the internet

For the past couple of weeks, the internet has been eating one of its own. Colleen Ballinger, the creator of the comedy character Miranda Sings, one of the first and biggest YouTube sensations, has been accused of grooming and exploiting her mostly child and young teenage fans.

What was already an ugly spectacle was dialled up a notch when Ballinger released a video on Thursday in which she “apologised” for the mess via a song, while playing the ukulele.

Titled simply “hi”, the 10-minute video has already been viewed more than 3 million times, drawn rebuttals on Twitter from some of those embroiled in the saga, and spawned a multitude of memes on TikTok. Far from dousing the flames of internet outrage, it has only added fuel to the fire.

So, who is Colleen Ballinger and what has she allegedly done?
Ballinger, 36, was an early adopter of YouTube, creating her first channel (in her own name) in 2007. By February 2008, she had posted her first video as Miranda, with only the vaguest hints of the egotistical, talentless, high-waisted, lipstick-smeared musical theatre wannabe she would become.

Ballinger had created the character while studying musical performance at university in California a couple of years earlier. According to a 2010 story in Broadway World, “Miranda videos were meant to be an inside joke between Colleen’s friends – the classically trained singer used to stay off pitch in college choir classes just to annoy her classmates.”

By 2009, Miranda Sings had her own YouTube channel, and by 2015 both Ballinger and Miranda were bona fide stars, winning awards, releasing books and albums, touring internationally (including to Australia), clocking up billions of views and a combined subscriber base (across multiple YouTube channels) of around 20 million. On TikTok, she has another 9 million followers.

With her deliberately terrible singing, farting and burping, and outsized ego, Miranda Sings mostly appeals to children and young teens (the content she publishes under her own name is pitched much older). And in the early days of social media, Ballinger/Miranda engaged directly with many of them on social media and via chat groups. For some fans, that direct connection blurred the line between fandom and friendship.

Colleen Ballinger has toured the world as Miranda Sings, including visits to Australia.

So, where did it all go wrong?
In 2020, a former fan called Adam McIntyre, then aged 17, released a 25-minute video in which he made a number of allegations against Ballinger, including that she had used his labour without payment in creating social media posts, and that she had sent him lingerie, when he was just 14. He also claimed she had dumped him like a hot potato after a tweet he had crafted for her sparked a massive fan backlash over claims of homophobia.

Soon after, Ballinger released her own video, in which she apologised for the lingerie incident. “I should have realised and recognised how dumb that was and never sent it to him,” she said. She claimed she had intended to offer McIntyre paid work after a trial period, but had changed her mind after the Twitter backlash.

“No, I should never have sent a fan underwear – how stupid am I? No, I definitely shouldn’t have given him access to my Twitter account. And no, I shouldn’t have talked to him as often as I did. But I am not a monster, I am not a groomer, and I shouldn’t kill myself.”

Ballinger was approached via her management for this story, but did not respond.

That seemed to be it, until a few weeks ago, when another former fan called KodeeRants (aka Kodee Tyler) posted a video, since deleted, in which they confessed to having been a member of a group that had bombarded McIntyre with vitriol after his video appeared, implying that Ballinger had urged them to do so. Other fans have since come out of the woodwork with their own tales of, according to a report in Rolling Stone, “being bullied, intimidated, and embarrassed by Ballinger and members of her team”.

That video prompted McIntyre to upload a new one, titled “I was right about Colleen Ballinger”, and thus the tide of internet opinion began to swing against her in a major way.

How has Ballinger responded to all this?
Back in 2020, she tackled it head-on, in a seemingly genuine apology video. This time around she was quiet – until Thursday, when she uploaded what might well be the least apologetic apology video of all time.

“Hi everyone,” she says, while strumming a ukulele. “I’ve been wanting to come online and talk to you about a few things, even though my team has strongly advised me to not say what I wanna say. I recently realised that they never said I couldn’t sing what I wanna say.”

Referring to her interactions with fans “many years ago”, she describes them as the actions of a loser rather than a groomer. “I was trying to be besties with everybody,” she says, adding “there were times in the DMs when I would overshare”. Admitting that was weird, she claims to have “changed my behaviour, and I took accountability”. She then sings about the toxic gossip train, which is “made of lies” and “steamrolls over someone’s reputation”.

Defiantly she sings, “I know you wanted me to say that I was 100 per cent in the wrong, well I’m sorry, I’m not going to take that route, of admitting to lies and rumours that you made up for clout”.

Is anyone convinced?
On YouTube, which is ground zero for this whole mess, the comments suggest Ballinger still has a lot of support, though not everyone thinks this latest video was a great move. The comment “this is so painfully millennial” has been liked 94,000 times. “Zero days without nonsense” has been given 21,000 thumbs up.

Adam McIntyre’s furious ukulele-driven response, meanwhile, has been viewed more than 400,000 times since going live on Friday.

Does any of this matter?
In the grand scheme of things, perhaps not. No one has accused Ballinger of committing a crime, only of behaving unethically and irresponsibly. But this sad episode does point to the strange world of parasocial relationships on the internet, in which one party believes the bond is real, deep and mutual, while the other party barely knows they exist.

The bond between McIntyre and Ballinger was clearly more than that, until it wasn’t. If nothing else, the saga shows that children are vulnerable online, no matter how sophisticated they might seem, and that adults have a responsibility to protect them from inappropriate behaviour and content.

And it perhaps also proves the internet hath no fury like a fan spawned.

Contact the author at [e-mail], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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