Her toes twisted the ignition. Her right foot held the brake as her left worked the gear selector. Cruising sunny suburban streets toward a nearby Walmart, the year-old slid her toes off the wheel to nudge the turn signal. A guy in a pickup craned his head when Rowley drove by in search of a parking space. Like her clips on how she opens a can of olives, or applies false eyelashes, she would share it with her , combined followers on TikTok and Instagram. Unpaid for now, she hoped to turn social media into her career.
The occasional viral post with millions of views had brought thousands of new followers, but most still fell far short of that. She needed to keep building. And she knows that when you give people the anonymity of the internet, their inhibitions come down, for better or worse. She first went viral for reenacting the time a restaurant employee asked her to take her feet off a table while she was eating.
Commenters seemed genuinely curious how she did other stuff, so she showed them. On TikTok, she has assembled furniture, cooked scrambled eggs and removed and replaced her nose ring. She has exited a swimming pool, eaten with chopsticks and painted her nails. Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Rowley keeps a notebook with page after page of neatly-written ideas for future posts, jotted down with her dominant right foot. Half have come from followers.
How dare she endanger her children like that, someone once asked. Rowley does not have kids. A post shared by Emily Rowley emrrowley. She has dealt with similar frustrations as other creators in the era of automated moderation.
That still bugs her. Her driving videos have been tagged with a warning label for dangerous activity. Another platform, she said, restricted her nail-painting videos to users 18 and older, she thinks because they were mistaken for fetish content. Neither Rowley or her mom remember a single discussion about her lack of arms when she was growing up. She took some rough falls, wore a helmet, rode a scooter and swam on her back in the ocean. She survived other medical issues, including annual surgeries for scoliosis from ages 6 to She wants to be independent.
