At Age 2, 'Side-Eyeing Chloe' Became a Viral Meme. 12 Years Later, Her Mom Reveals Why She Has a 'Lot of Guilt' (Exclusive)

In the age of social media, few images have been as widely circulated as the famously "unimpressed" face of a toddler strapped into her car seat. The timeless meme still circulates as people online continue to employ it to represent skepticism, judgment and everything in between.

Over a decade later, Chloe Clem no longer resembles her gap-toothed, 2-year-old self in the back of her parents' car. Now, at age 14, she's grown up and out of who she once was when she made online history with the "Side Eyeing Chloe" meme.

After a whirlwind experience with fame, a welcome change in lifestyle and, eventually, a reckoning with what it means to truly go viral, Chloe's mother has changed too.

For the most part, Katie Clem tells PEOPLE exclusively that it's been a "fun ride" witnessing her daughter's likeness earn a place in internet history. The iconic picture is a screenshot snapped of the family's YouTube video from 2013, which showed Chloe and her older sister Lily's contrasting reactions to a big surprise: behind the camera, Katie told them that they weren't going to school that day — instead, they were going to Disneyland.

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Shocked 7-year-old Lily burst into excited tears of disbelief, just as she had two years before in her parents' video "Lily's Disneyland Surprise!" In their sequel post — titled "Lily's Disneyland Surprise....AGAIN!" — the camera panned to young Chloe, who appeared to glare at the camera with little emotion, if not a hint of displeasure, too.

Initially, Katie just posted Lily's first surprise on Facebook, but her friends urged her to share it on YouTube. The 2011 video has since surpassed over 20 million views as of January 2025. As a result of the traction, the family was invited to stay in Disneyland's Dream Suite, and they got to visit New York City.

However if Lily's solo reaction made a big splash online, her little sister's follow-up crashed in waves that have yet to wash away.

"Lily's was like a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing," says Katie. "And Chloe's, because of the meme, was just insanely crazy."

In terms of the YouTube attention, the second surprise now has only about 4 million more views than its predecessor. But nearly 12 years ago, Katie noticed her daughter flooding the web within just a few weeks of her original upload. She was told to check out Tumblr, a site she hadn't even heard of at the time.

"My friends were like, 'You need to see this. This is crazy.' So I went on to Tumblr and I remember just seeing Chloe's little face everywhere," Katie recalls to PEOPLE. "I realized someone had taken a screenshot from the video and created it, because it wasn't us."

Considering her younger daughter's early age, Katie was completely taken aback and somewhat unsettled. They uploaded the video shortly before their trip to Disneyland; within a day of their arrival at the amusement park, Chloe was already getting recognized.

"Chloe was 2, and people were coming up to her," Katie says. "They were freaking out. They were taking pictures of her."

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From then on, the family's life looked markedly different. They own the original image outright, meaning they've been able to monetize its commercial use. Katie and her husband, David, have received multiple sponsorships and made deals with corporate giants like Google Pixel. In 2021, they sold the image as a non-fungible token for around $74,000.

"10 years ago, we were so poor. This happened to us and we're like, 'What? We can pay bills. We can upgrade our tiny apartment for the four of us.' It was real-world issues," the Tennessee resident explains. "That money literally helped us survive for a decade. Every ounce of the money, aside from saving it and putting it away, was helping us get through our life. Rent, bills, food."

David has lost his job a few times since the meme emerged; according to Katie, the profit helped them stay afloat. It put him through school. They were able to buy a car. In more recent years, they've been able to set some of the funds aside to save up for Chloe's education and any future wedding.

"I look back and I'm just like, 'How?'" Katie continues. "I don't believe in God. I'm not religious, but I'm like, 'Wow, that intervention — divine intervention.' Because it came to us at very, very vulnerable times in our life throughout the last 10 years."

In addition to the general lifestyle upgrade, Chloe has visited Brazil twice, once when she was around 4 years old and again when she was 6. She tells PEOPLE those trips are two of the biggest highlights of her entire experience as a viral celebrity.

"There was a lot of people there that I met and things that I got to do there, and it was so cool," Chloe tells PEOPLE.

Google funded the vacations so Chloe could visit her massive fanbase. "South America is obsessed with Chloe," Katie notes, likening it to the Beatlemania craze of the 1960s. "She's so famous in Brazil. I don't know how or why."

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She says that during the height of Chloe's fame, they were constantly swarmed by hundreds of people whenever they went out in Brazil. "It was insane. She had billboards all over São Paulo," Katie adds.

After Chloe shot to fame, the Clems continued feeding their YouTube following as family vloggers, uploading short clips of footage from the girls' day-to-day lives. Videos like "Lily and Chloe enjoying the fall leaves!" and "Chloe shows you her favorite toys" evolved into more formally edited content documenting family events and milestones, such as Easter and Christmas celebrations and a summer post from 2019 titled "LAST DAY OF SCHOOL! And...did Lily have her first kiss???"

In the beginning, Katie says she was committed to YouTube. When she posted consistently, the channel racked up around 300,000 subscribers, with some videos garnering millions of views again. However the posts slowed down at the end of 2020, and since then, the Clem Family has only posted two YouTube videos: one in July 2021 and another more recently, in June 2024. Both only feature Katie's youngest, with the latter titled "Chloe is back!"

The drop off in content was intentional. Once Katie noticed her kids' enthusiasm waning, she was quick to trust her instincts. She maintains that "there were never any red flags" amid Chloe's peak fame, but she also acknowledges that her then-young daughters never technically agreed to participate in videos.

"In the beginning, it was really fun ... You just hop on this train and you say yes to everything," she reflects. "I did not include my kids' consent at all in the beginning. We just did it because you get wrapped up in all of the things."

Katie continues, "Eventually it got too much with my kids, and I just felt like no one was benefiting from it."

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She did set some limits at the time. When Lily was around 6 or 7, Disney reached out with interest in featuring Lily on a TV show; Katie immediately shut it down, thinking of how she's seen the spotlight negatively impact child stars as they grow up.

"I just knew that is not the direction I wanted for my children. And then through personal experiences raising them, I am so incredibly grateful that I listened to my instinct and didn't go that route," she explains.

Today, she has mixed feelings toward the concept of family YouTube channels, including her own. She remembers how people wanted to see her kids all the time, on any platform. She recognizes now that she was feeding into that, though the overwhelming positivity and undeniable fun of it all blurred any concerns she might've been feeling at the time.

"It kind of just took a turn toward the end, and I just was like, 'I don't think I want this much exposure with my kids,'" she reflects. "Once they got a little bit older, I was forcing them to do things and I could tell they were bored. I could tell they were tired, and I'm like, 'Okay, we're done.'"

They took a significant break, as demonstrated by their past few years of YouTube activity. Since Katie reckoned with her kids' comfort levels and her role in protecting them, she's been adamant that everything they post is "very intentional." She makes sure her kids genuinely want to participate in any social media content they put out. Even when they've keenly shown interest, Katie kept their lines of communication open.

"I was constantly talking to them, 'Are you guys done with this?' And when they were like, 'Yeah, I'm done,' then I was like, 'All right, then we won't do as much,'" she tells PEOPLE. "It was kind of like a family decision."

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While Katie can appreciate the fact that her mindset has evolved, she emphasizes the fact that it took her time to come to that conclusion.

"I think it's so hard when you're a parent and you're getting all of these accolades and all of these things and your kids are famous. It is such a wild ride to be in because it's about you [and] it's about them," she says.

She compares the widespread, international attention to "love bombing." Everyone wanted a piece of her family, and everything — "the money, the attention, the fame, how my kids were reacting to it" — felt good to Katie. In a room full of 50 people, each one would be praising her child. It was monumental, she reflects.

"I had to balance that, and it was just hard. It was really hard back then," Katie adds. "The mom I am today is not the same mom I was back then, and I feel like people don't talk about it as much."

She believes she and her husband made every decision in good faith, with good reasoning, and they never got taken advantage of. She says she did everything she could with the information she had, but in the beginning, she rarely stopped to question how it would affect Lily and Chloe in the long term.

Even today, when she notices how other family vloggers regard — or fail to regard — their kids' privacy, Katie questions how her willingness to feed the viral frenzy affected her kids. "Did I do everything right? Did I do everything wrong? Are the behaviors and the things that my kids are displaying 10 years out because of this happening?" she asks herself. "I do have a lot of guilt."

Katie doesn't know if she would've done things differently. "All I know is my feelings have drastically changed about the situation," she says. That said, Chloe — who rarely gets recognized now that she's a teenager — looks back with pride.

"I'm in the What Do You Meme game, so I would always bring my card from that game to show people," Chloe tells PEOPLE. "It's super cool."

If anything, she sees her parents' old videos as a sort of archive of her childhood. It's like looking at old family photos that the whole world can enjoy as well. She doesn't really feel famous anymore, but there are "still a lot of things that happen because of my meme," she notes.

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The "original side eye queen," as her Instagram bio states, actually sees a future for herself on social media. Chloe likes the idea of creating content on YouTube and Instagram. Her mom says the 14-year-old has recently come out of her shell more, but generally, she describes her as "very shy" and "very introverted." Katie always wonders if that trait is "a product of everything that happened."

She's proud to have that consistent communication with her two daughters, especially as they continue to update Chloe's Instagram page with photos and videos. While Lily is now 19 and doing "her own things," the parents remain vigilant about checking in with Chloe about any social media activity, since she's still a minor.

Katie has adopted a new perspective when it comes to their online audience. She doesn't care about impressing their viewers or giving them access to her child in the way she used to. "A lot of things have changed for me," Katie admits.

Their most recent YouTube video, which sees Chloe shopping at Target, was an idea of her own. Katie greenlit her daughter's idea because it was "innocent [and] harmless" and an accurate representation of what Chloe actually likes to do.

"I just let her come to me, and she doesn't really come to me for videos," Katie shares. "If she's like, 'Mom, I want to make a video,' I kind of give her the license to do whatever she wants to do in the video, obviously within reason."

While speaking to PEOPLE alongside her daughter, Katie pauses to ask Chloe, "Do you regret any of the fame or anything that happened?"

"No," the middle schooler responds resolutely. "Not at all."

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