I have some good friends who've gone the other way: they've asked that there be as close to no photos or videos of their child on any social media as possible. They don't post about him online, and they keep pictures of him in photo albums. When he was born, they asked all of us to please refrain from taking photos of him without their permission.<p>I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.
One of the most horrifying social media pages I've seen was an influencer who billed herself as a "trans activist" and documented every moment of her trans daughter's life.<p>This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online (and of course get massive likes/shares by well-intentioned folks wanting to "raise awareness"), and request donations for her "activism."<p>That girl will never be able to "pass" as female due to her face/identity being plastered on social media as a trans kid. She also will have to live with the horror of millions of strangers knowing the gory details of her trying to shove a knife into her wrist, chugging Tylenol, and having complete mental breakdowns at school that required emergency medical intervention.<p>My gut instinct also suspects the girl's poor mental health has a strong element of Munchausen by Proxy. It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge.<p>Despite all this, the mom was clearly raking in donations, and collecting thousands of comments about what a "hero" she was for "bringing light" to trans issues. The horrified comments by trans individuals were always buried at the bottom of posts.<p>The entire page felt like thinly-veiled child abuse, but there isn't anything in Facebook's code of conduct that could be used to stop it. And Facebook of course had no incentive to address the content--the page had millions of likes and was surely a great source of traffic/profit.<p>I would love to see policies in place to restrict this sort of child exploitation. I am all for freedom of speech on social medical platforms, but blatant exploitation of children in exchange for money is a special sort of cruelty that should be reined in.
This article unfortunately doesn't cover a much darker part of the TikTok children: exploitation of the children for the titillation of online creepers. The Some Place Under Neith podcast goes into this extensively [their "Parasocial Pits Of Hell" series]. It's completely legal to vlog your children in swimming outfits or a similar level of skin exposure, have the children sing or perform for their "fans", and encourage their children to form participate in parasocial relationships with the audience. It nets mad money.<p><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/some-place-under-neith" rel="nofollow">https://www.stitcher.com/show/some-place-under-neith</a>
Apparently, this is known as Sharenting and has its own Wikipedia page... <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting</a><p>> Sharenting is the practice of parents publicizing sensitive content about their children on internet platforms. While the term was coined as recently as 2010, sharenting has become an international phenomenon with widespread presence in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. As such, sharenting has also ignited disagreement as a controversial application of social media. Detractors find that it violates child privacy and hurts a parent-child relationship. Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context.<p>There is a section "Applicable legislation":<p>> There appears to be little guiding legislation regarding parents' online control over their children's media. While different countries have their respective laws to protect children's privacy, most hand over the responsibility to the children's guardians, which sharenting may exploit as the parent is able to take advantage of their child's power to consent. This presumption in favor of the parent fails to protect the child's privacy from their parents.<p>> Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations broadly advocates for a child's individual identity. Article 14 outlines the applicable legal guardians' duty to represent the child's best interest.<p>Which then goes into the specifics for Europe and the United States.
With how toxic we already know social media is, steeping someone's entire childhood experience in it is just awful. I'm hoping the bills for child protection discussed in the articles are passed, but even supposing they are... how many children will be destroyed before they even realize the damage that's been done? Sure, they'll be able to get money or have the videos taken down, but just as there's a trend among Hollywood child stars for their futures...
I guess the solution is to try to take some of the law's protecting child actors and apply them to influencers? <a href="https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/child-actor-labor-laws" rel="nofollow">https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/child-actor-labor-laws</a><p>I think it is hard, because influences are in random jurisdictions and just arise without much structure. Maybe it can be controlled at the platform level, like YouTube and TikTok as they are the ones funnel money to these influencers? It would require some creativity and a lot of desire.
> Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss.<p>This sounds super-scummy. I'm not surprised she's pissed-off. Both parents quit working? And if Claire doesn't perform, they'll lose their home and she won't be able to "have nice things"? Talk about emotional blackmail.
The examples in the article aren't even the worse ones I've seen. There's a class of videos where the parents have a special interest, or specific lifestyle they want to live and not only they force their kids to live that life and do those things, but also record them for views. There's one with a family that lives in an RV (willingly) with very little space and they make the children record videos for views. I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny...
Once again money is the root of all evil. What would be the downside if all videos that had any children in them were demonetized? In addition, buttons for sharing such videos would be automatically disabled. That means a parent could post the video and send links to family, but it would make it less likely for the video to go viral.<p>Looking at the example of culture even before the internet, kids who participate in entertainment from a young age end up often messed up. For example see the Jacksons (Michael being only the most prominent example in his family) as well as a multitude of child stars (Shirley Temple being the exception that proves the rule).<p>I bet once you removed the financial incentive a lot of this over sharing of kids’ lives would mostly stop.
Christoper Robin Milne is a famous example of having one's childhood turned into content, although obviously nothing anywhere near as pervasively as happens with attention-starved "influencers" leveraging their children for a dopamine rush:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robin_Milne" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Robin_Milne</a>
Why aren’t all the participants (influencers) in a performance (channel) automatically actors already? That seems obvious. We acknowledge people with blogs as writers and authors. Is the weird, made-up language around streaming an intentional obfuscation of the precedent in behavior and law?
Agency. It’s about agency.<p>Social media, while not permanent, can be long lasting, and can have a chilling effect on a child’s future agency.<p>Guarding it until they can make their own decisions is what all good parents ought to do.<p>How is this not obvious and common sense?
I feel terrible for kids like this whose entire lives are put on the Internet and there's nothing they can do about it. Like that poor autistic kid, whose mother used him to make videos and make money, and then "re-homed" him like he was an animal.
The purity spiral on full display in this comment section. Somehow social media makes it the default state on topics like this, even in places that typically have a lot of nuance.
I'm here for the cynical take: the size of the issue depends on whether it's successful. Lots of childhoods suck, and lots of parents make bad decisions.<p>"My childhood was made into content and all I got was this multi-million dollar inheritance" doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of people have worse childhoods and don't get a penny.
> When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].”<p>Maybe I was raised differently, but it sounds like her family got the deal of a lifetime. Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it. I know folks here on H1B that live shoestring and send more than half of what they make back home to their family, and are happy to do so. I know it's easy to paint Claire as having been exploited here, but can one not look at the bigger picture and see that this is clearly a positive thing for their family?<p>If I was 17 again and had the opportunity to post videos of myself talking instead of my parents working 50h weeks, I know I'd do it in a heartbeat.