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.
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.
My wife and I have done similar. We privately share photos. It took a bit for my mom to get over the fact that she can’t post pictures of her grandkids on Facebook but I was eventually able to explain why in terms she understood.
Yeah, this has been a source of hurt feelings for my parents, my wife's parents, and the parents of many of our peers... Facebook-addicted Boomers literally crying, "But everyone else gets to put up pictures of their grandchildren!"
I am a parent of a toddler and he’s only on Apple Photos, my wife and I don’t use social media.
That said, I expect to be downvoted into oblivion.
> anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them
I don’t know, I mean a lot of parents tell themselves they are doing a lot of things, me included, that they have no control over in reality.
I sympathize with the parents who try to turn their kids into celebs. We made this celebs-rule world.
For every one person, kids or adults, who feels exposed online, there are 99,999 more toiling away in obscurity.
On this forum probably the children are going to be fine. Their parents are rich enough that even if you are not a nepo baby in the strictest sense of having a famous last name, they will be fine. They can do whatever and they will be fine.
If you’re some random person, obscurity is crushing. If you’re not a nepo baby and you have no above average cognitive gifts, which is 80% of people, getting some attention can change your life.
Most people have the level of drama, the stupidity, the vapidity of influencers. You just didn’t know that until TikTok. TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.
And social media DOES benefit them, it IS rational. It’s the textbook definition of elitism to tell people who found a little fame and like it that they aren’t like the smart kids or true blue nepo babies, who can be offline and still thrive in this world.
> TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.
I agree with the first but not the second. I think "social media" is a net good, by far. At the same time, there are negative effects: one is that it creates a constant audience for whatever stupid thing the Influencer wants to do or say, which is an incentive for them to say or do stupid things.
My sister has gone to this extreme, and I do feel like it is extreme. She doesn't allow her kids to do sports, for example, for fear of their name or image getting out. In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.
To me this feels like the cell phone discussions of the mid-90s (people who refused to get cell phones because they didn't want to be constantly connected). Eventually almost everyone realizes that the world has changed. Unless you keep your kid from interacting with the world, there will eventually be little you can do to prevent them from having some online presence.
I don't think your sister is where my friends are. They're not demanding schools not take class photos, or whatever. They're just asking people not to record their child and post them online without getting permission first. Most schools at least have you sign a release that outlines what the video/photos would be used for.
> In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.
If the kid wants to "build their brand" with parental permission, that's one thing. It's another thing entirely for random people unrelated to the kid to record them and put it online.
Hard same on this. I didn’t think about it for the first few years of being a parent but, several years ago, I deleted all photos of my kids on social media, as well as a few random ones I had on my blog (followed soon after by deleting all non-professional social media content and accounts). Triggered by an article I read (I wish I’d kept it), it occurred to me that I didn’t have the right to use my kids’ images without their permission. All it once, it felt unfair and irresponsible. Soon after, my oldest asked me, after taking her picture, something to the effect of “is that going to be on the internet?” I was pleased to say “no, never.”
Aside: I wonder if it’s going to be a different experience for kids in the generations that have thousands of photos from their childhood available to them. As someone interested in knowing more about my past, I can’t help but to think it will be a good thing to know all the cool stuff they did, whether they remember it or not.
I try to do this for myself, & often request that nobody take photos of me if possible, but definitely to not to post images of me online without my explicit permission. Even amongst my close friends & family, it frequently causes friction & outright anger.
Same. I wish this was the default (don't post pics of me without my consent), but unfortunately it's not. People just expect that everyone wants to be blasted all over social media, and they get butt-hurt when I ask them to remove pics of me.
- Hey, thanks for inviting me to your wife's birthday party. I had a lot of fun. But could you please remove my pic from your Facebook post?
- Why did you show up in the first place? OR You're in a lot of the pics; I can't remove all of them. OR Are you too good to be seen in pics with my wife and her friends? OR Are you hiding from the law? Did you murder someone?
Do you actually phrase it as a request? I find that some social media averse people also tend to be curt/sharp with their requests (I totally understand the underlying concern though).
I feel like photos are nothing special, a lot of the friction/anger people are just responding to perceiving an accusatory tone. (But I'm willing to let the odd photo slide, so maybe dropping the worst arguments made life easier)
My wife and I do this for our kids. Photo albums are more fun anyways as looking through them and talking about the memories is more of an event then just getting a 'like' on a photo.
100% on the same page here, I plan on doing the same, and my sister does the same thing with her kid. Seems so weird to freely share intimately private pictures of children, family scenes, etc. on the open internet. They used to be tucked in grandma's photo album under the living room coffee table.
> "Seems so weird to freely share intimately private pictures of children, family scenes, etc. on the open internet."
Weird and potentially dangerous as well. When I was a child, adults warned us about "stranger danger", but now parents advertise their children to potentially dangerous strangers…
What I find truly weird is how many people there are that don't find it "weird" or at all concerning in any way to openly share such photos so freely.
We have a couple of young kiddos and we took the same approach. Family completely understands and has done a phenomenal job of respecting our request. What helped was meeting them halfway - we live away from most of our extended families, so I set up a private photo gallery on a subdomain on my personal website that family members can log into that I'll upload to once or twice a week.
Why not call your children John or Maria Smith at birth then? Wouldn't this guarantee almost full anonymity in most contexts?
The typical security precautions are very hard to maintain in real life.
e.g. should your child win some spelling context or a regional crosscountry run or whatever, how would you explain to them that their name and photo are not appearing among all the other winners?
If there are random pictures of their kids in the background of some photo posted to Facebook, how are they not anonymous anymore?
I'm reminded of the scene from Jurassic park, where nedry is chastised for using a man's name during a clandestine meeting at a restaurant, and nedry yells out "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares!"
>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.
Same. There is something unsettling about willfully pushing kids into the attention economy, it can't be good for mental health long term and definitely assists nefarious actors build permanent profiles of them.
We did the same. My mother wasn't very understanding but she did comply. I think we caused her some issues because my sister posted on Facebook but it's all good now.
Private shared photo albums in Apple Photos are great for this. I have a small child and my wife and I live far from our extended families. Sharing photos and videos of our daughter via a shared album gives the same immediacy as posting to social media does (you even have likes, comments, etc) but it's way more private.
As long as everyone has an Apple device it just works, and I assume there is probably a similar way to do this with a Google photo album (although I will say, I think Google is way more likely to do something sketchy like default everything to public or make it easy for someone to publish content accidentally).
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
As a parent this really stands out. I have a kid around that age and almost his entire "serious" knowledge comes from home. He does pick a lot from other kids at school but in a very abstract way.
When I think about what is on his mind compared to what you painted there, the difference is mind-blowing. A good illustration of the dangers of social media for people —of all age— who lack guidance and perspective.
> 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
Munchausen's by proxy is real, and the consequences of it are at least as damaging as denying children access to medical transition services.
I believe that you have taken the position that this child is really experiencing gender dysphoria, but it's at least an equally plausible scenario that the parents are responsible for that too.
This is a serious hole in the argument for providing gender affirming care to children in an attempt to reduce harm. The trans-activist community is becoming complicit in child abuse when it denies the existence of this problem.
Ignoring the fact that 8-year-olds do not receive medical treatment for gender dysphoria, is the existence of Munchausen's by proxy also "a serious hole in the argument" for providing children with medical care in general?
There's no denial of the problem, only of the attempt to elevate it into something more common than it is in an obvious ploy to make gender affirming care harder to access with a time-honored "won't someone think of the children!" moral panic that's already having negative effects on adult trans people's access to care.
Yeah this is one of those stories that if you really feel like it's worth telling so that people can understand the experience of trans kids and what it's like as a parent you need to contact a journalist who knows how to do this right so they can tell the story in a way that can't be traced back to you or your child. The very last thing someone who's trans needs is to have a spotlight shoved in their face involuntarily.
I actually do work in the space of telling the stories of trans folks (although not involving kids because obviously) and even with adults we still take crazy precautions. I push hard even when we get someone who doesn't want to be anonymous because you can't put that cat back in the bag and being a google search from being outed will haunt you if you ever want to "go stealth."
> The very last thing someone who's trans needs is to have a spotlight shoved in their face involuntarily.
Exactly! This seems so incredibly obvious, and I was stunned by the thousands of followers on the page who seemed to nonchalantly view this kid's privacy and wellbeing as a worthy sacrifice for supposed "trans activism." Especially since there were quite a few negative comments from trans individuals pointing out why this was wrong and a major violation of the girl's rights.
Stories about trans kids are very important to tell, and they can be wonderful tools to encourage empathy and understanding. But they deserve the utmost caution and respect when handling them, especially when there is the complication of people being able to profit off the children.
The other startling thing about the page was the mom's complete lack of interest in shielding details such as what school or hospital the girl went to. It seemed wildly dangerous to publicly proclaim your child to be a member of an endangered minority who often faces hate crimes, and then tell the world exactly which elementary school they attend. Talk about a great way to bait nut-jobs.
I realize I sound very twisted talking about those sorts of possibilities, but as someone who works in cybersecurity, I have just seen too many creeps commit too many crimes.
I would absolutely love to see a policy that forbids the sharing of photos of children, and any identifying details of children, to a public audience. If people want to share those things with their direct network, then sure. But it seems a wild violation of personal rights to be able to share those personal details about another human being to the entire internet, when the child is far too young to consent.
Absolutely gut wrenching. This is child abuse plain and simple. These people are confusing their children and raking in the $$$ and making themselves feel good for virtue signalling. What's society heading for? Wake up.
I’m not sure social media deserves all the blame here. This kind of exploitation has its roots in reality shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and I Am Jazz - there’s no bright line between those shows and what you describe.
Jazz in particular has been treated terribly. He's been physically and mentally destroyed by his family and his clinicians, brainwashed from age 2 or 3 into believing he was supposed to be a girl. This nightmare is all he's ever known. There will be no happy ending either, just misery and the shock of realizing his life is a travesty.
His show should be watched as a dire warning against the medical abuse of children.
I saw a post from the mom mentioning CPS had been called on her, which was the only reason I didn't call myself. I am skeptical of CPS in general, but an 8-year-old with multiple, sophisticated suicide attempts, and a mother making money off these attempts, just seemed way too sketchy to ignore.
Unfortunately, it seemed CPS had cleared her. At the time (this was back in ~2017), I shared the page with a friend who works alongside CPS, and she grudgingly agreed there wasn't really anything CPS could do. The kid seemed to have legitimate medical diagnoses, and the mom could easily argue in court that she was just "documenting her daughter's medical journey."
I can't seem to find the page now, which I'm hoping means it got shut down. Fingers crossed that little girl has found health, happiness, and the privacy she deserves.
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.
- I agree that parents who publicize their children on social media are massive creep in my opinion, who do a massive invasion of the child privacy. That should almost be illegal in my opinion since the child can't consent.
- At the same time saying that no skin should ever be shown ever because "it titills sexual creeps" is a dark road that points in a direction which in some places ends up at covering the faces of women for the exact same reason. Should we forbid children to go to the pool because sexual creeps might go there ?
On the other hand in many places of Northern europe nudity is more common even in public. That works because they don't culturally associate as much nudity with sex as americans or other parts of the world do.. (You'd obviously get beaten up for masturbating in these places especially with children around.). And that doesn't seem like so bad a thing to me
You’re underselling the social and financial dynamic of specifically recording children in minimal clothing and asking them to perform for anonymous strangers on the internet.
It’s entirely different than standard social standards about clothing and nudity in public.
TBH I agree with you that we shouldn't forbid children from wearing standard amounts of clothing (i.e. not much) to go swimming due to creeps existing generally in the world.
I'm talking about intentionally filming one's own children for the viewership of creeps online for perpetual consumption in order to make a profit. This would be akin to making one's living by nonconsensually filming nude beach visitors in northern europe for 8 hrs+/day and uploading that online vs someone just visiting a nude beach.
> That should almost be illegal in my opinion since the child can't consent.
Genuine Q: at what point can the child consent? A lot of people here are talking about a media blackout of their children since the child can't consent, but when does that end? Can a 5-year-old consent to have their pictures posted online? 10? 15?
> Should we forbid children to go to the pool because sexual creeps might go there ?
I don’t suggest that, but I think it’s pretty bad to post lots of swimsuit pics to social media. And it’s absolutely horrible to accept money in exchange for 1:1 videos or commissioned photos for internet strangers. There’s no legitimate purposes for adults to ask little kids to pose on swimsuits for them. I’m not sure if it should be illegal, but certainly scorned and people who practice to have appropriate levels of opprobrium.
> Should we forbid children to go to the pool because sexual creeps might go there ?
It's significant easier to hone your creepiness when you have an endless supply of training-material. It might even help you to discover this side of you in the first place.
> On the other hand in many places of Northern europe nudity is more common even in public.
Not with children. Even in Europe parents are generally quite protective with them. And here the topic of family-influencer and sexualization of their children is also a hot topic.
While I find parents doing this extremely concerning I am personally really hesitant to change anything because I can't think of any way to change it that doesn't seriously hinder normal and not creepy parental uses of images/videos of their children. We are already running into overreach problems trying to curtail the stuff we clearly need to curtail (i.e. that guy having to deal with the police for sending his kid's pediatrician a picture of some problem) I can't imagine what that would end up like if it happened on a large portion of videos shared with your kids in it.
I like the (for some reason downvoted) reasonable suggestion by someone else to simply not monetize videos containing children. Doesn't YouTube already have some kind of classifier that finds children in videos, which lets them turn off commenting on those videos? Just extend that to also de-monetize them.
Sure, it doesn't solve the problem of child videos using other monetization channels like product placement, sponsorships and so on but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
> While I find parents doing this extremely concerning I am personally really hesitant to change anything because I can't think of any way to change it that doesn't seriously hinder normal and not creepy parental uses of images/videos of their children
Ban the commercialization of videos and images containing kids. No more child actors, singers, models, etc. Remove the child labor law exceptions which have been given to these industries.
That guy had to deal with the cops, because Google spied on him and didn't even bother talking to him first to find out why he took those pictures, but immediately assumed the worst.
Thankfully the cops investigated the case and concluded that it wasn't a crime.
If you're posting content to the public (i.e. random strangers), you're on one side of the line. If you're posting content in a controlled manner to people consisting of friends and family you actually know, you're on the other side of the line.
And the movie and music industries. Humorous video about this serious topic, which outlines the problem of parents selling their kids to these industries in a palatable manner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJh6jgnqn_s
There should be a general blanket ban on parents monetizing their kids. We don't need child actors in movies, most stories can be written to avoid their necessity. And maybe very soon, it should be feasible to replace child actors with CGI.
Child pageants are creepy AF. They are perfect targets for creeps - former President Trump, for example, got alleged by five women to have walked in on girls as young as 15 while they were changing [1] -, but even without that level of creepiness, the sexualization of young girls has been closely linked to mental health issues down the road [2].
And this legalized pedophilia industry makes 5 billion dollars a year[3]. Unbelievable.
My wife and I watched a season of this stuff just to gawk at how terrible/creepy it was. Then we felt bad about contributing towards its popularity and stopped.
Wholly agree and people do recognize it as such. Also child actors (though they don't have all things in common, one thing they often have in common is exploitation by their parents/guardians as well as industry).
The concern isn't that these children will be raped or that pedophiles will rape them. It's much more subtle: these are children who are taught from a young age to be exploited. They are taught not to have boundaries with strangers, to tie self-worth and sense of self to external validation, and to squash down their own feelings of discomfort or even danger in order to placate authority figures around them. These are all things that they will have to spend a lot of resources and time unlearning to grow into healthy adulthood, hampered by the fact that videos of their exploitation will be continually on the internet for everyone to see for the rest of their lives.
I think this assumes that pedophiles are born with an attraction to children, as opposed to somehow having formed a mental association between children and sex through environmental factors. I wonder if there is evidence in either direction? From an evolutionary perspective the latter would be my default assumption, as the postulated evolutionary rationales for, say, homosexuality, at least, would not really apply to pedophilia.
> 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.
There is a section "Applicable legislation":
> 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.
> 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.
Which then goes into the specifics for Europe and the United States.
> Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context.
You know this framing is BS because they'd all scream bloody murder if monetizing that content were outlawed. It's not about pride in their children, it's about monetizing their children. Of course it's no surprise that somebody psychopathic enough to do this to their kids would also be comfortable lying about their motivation.
I think you're underestimating how twisted these peoples pathologies can get. They don't see any of it logically. They're exploitative monsters because they have no emotional control or situational awareness. Words of strangers online are reality to them. Thats how they got on the path theyre on in the first place. In their brief moments of clarity where they encounter intense cognitive dissonance is where the suicide attempts enter (how the kid likely learned about such methods).
Usually these types of behaviors are accelerated with some kind of pharmaceuticals.
No, really. A lot of people just want to show off kids to family and friends, and don't think about the repercussions of making it public on Facebook. The bulk of kid pics post there are not exploitation by the poster, they just don't know better than to trust zuck with photos of children.
This definition easily encompasses the people who post their kids' lives for no monetary gain,which is the vast majority of social media users. A lot of the people in their 20s who share every detail of their life on social media continue to do so once they have kids.
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 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.
The problem I see here is where would the "line" be? That is, when does that video you post on Instagram of your family at Disney or someone blowing out candles at a birthday stop being just a family video and starts being content?
I guess the easy way to make that distinction would be if your content is "monetized" but even then it seems like there are many loopholes and gotchas.
> The problem I see here is where would the "line" be? That is, when does that video you post on Instagram of your family at Disney or someone blowing out candles at a birthday stop being just a family video and starts being content?
A simpler definition could be how a content is meant to be spread; whether it is "broadcast" vs. "multicast/unicast".
Like, I cannot think of any legitimate reasons a kid's "performance" needs to be on tiktok. Facebook/whatsapp, maybe, if you're sharing it only with your friends, or even YouTube with linked-only if you want to send the link to grandma. But why would you ever want to publicly post a video of your child for five million+ viewers?
>That is, when does that video you post on Instagram of your family at Disney or someone blowing out candles at a birthday stop being just a family video and starts being content?
When you do it on an account that makes money or is even tangentially involved with making money.
When it earns money? When you just post video on Instagram, there is no way you will get money magically. You need to enter into contract somehow. That goes for any social network. Literally none of them will send you money unless you actively initiates it.
I think you can have some triggers, like X views or Y followers and at least Z videos or something like that and also that they have monetization turned on. Make it high enough that it excludes 99.9% or more of people posting family videos.
I always found it strange that child labor laws have an exception for acting. From what I've seen, acting is probably a worse job for kids than many of the jobs that are outlawed.
It's because an adult can do almost all jobs where child labor would be used, usually it's just that adults are more expensive; but in acting we don't really want to say that movies are prohibited to show kids or that all kid roles must be played by adult actors.
Like, do we want to make a rule that a family drama must be filmed without showing that family's kids? If not, then we have to permit child acting at least in some way.
You could argue that acting is a child doing something they want to do as artistic expression. Like, could you ban a kid from playing a concert if they are good at violin or piano; or could you ban them from selling their artwork or their singing?
I think it's really difficult because one person's heartwarming family content is another person's child exploitation. IMO there should be a rule that no children appear in public social media content (private would be fine) but I'm sure a great many people would be offended by that. It's tough when shitty parents have the legal right to be shitty.
Maybe a law where if your views of your videos with your kids have more than X followers or Y views on more Z videos -- it is definitely not just for friends and family and it isn't just a random video going viral. I could see that working.
I think that the solution is to have all such people register with no exceptions. Just make X and Y and Z high enough that it excludes the large majority of people.
I'm not some Rand-worshiping libertarian, but I do think the immediate response of (more or less) "there oughta be a law" whenever something negative gets press is maybe not ideal.
These people should probably be shamed publicly for this kind of exploitation, for sure. And things like the Coogan law should be applied when the kids are a big part of the brand.
> Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss.
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...
>I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny...
If you're thinking of daddyofive, IIRC they had the two kids who were from the dad's previous marriage taken away and put in their bio mom's custody. They were then charged with child neglect and restricted from uploading footage of their kids. They ignored that restriction with no consequences though.
I remember another where the parents were hardcore endurance athletes and they had their kids running marathons at the age of 7 or something like that. They bragged about having to "bribe" their exhausted kids into continuing to run.
Readit News
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.
That said, I expect to be downvoted into oblivion.
> anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them
I don’t know, I mean a lot of parents tell themselves they are doing a lot of things, me included, that they have no control over in reality.
I sympathize with the parents who try to turn their kids into celebs. We made this celebs-rule world.
For every one person, kids or adults, who feels exposed online, there are 99,999 more toiling away in obscurity.
On this forum probably the children are going to be fine. Their parents are rich enough that even if you are not a nepo baby in the strictest sense of having a famous last name, they will be fine. They can do whatever and they will be fine.
If you’re some random person, obscurity is crushing. If you’re not a nepo baby and you have no above average cognitive gifts, which is 80% of people, getting some attention can change your life.
Most people have the level of drama, the stupidity, the vapidity of influencers. You just didn’t know that until TikTok. TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.
And social media DOES benefit them, it IS rational. It’s the textbook definition of elitism to tell people who found a little fame and like it that they aren’t like the smart kids or true blue nepo babies, who can be offline and still thrive in this world.
I agree with the first but not the second. I think "social media" is a net good, by far. At the same time, there are negative effects: one is that it creates a constant audience for whatever stupid thing the Influencer wants to do or say, which is an incentive for them to say or do stupid things.
To me this feels like the cell phone discussions of the mid-90s (people who refused to get cell phones because they didn't want to be constantly connected). Eventually almost everyone realizes that the world has changed. Unless you keep your kid from interacting with the world, there will eventually be little you can do to prevent them from having some online presence.
> In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.
If the kid wants to "build their brand" with parental permission, that's one thing. It's another thing entirely for random people unrelated to the kid to record them and put it online.
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Aside: I wonder if it’s going to be a different experience for kids in the generations that have thousands of photos from their childhood available to them. As someone interested in knowing more about my past, I can’t help but to think it will be a good thing to know all the cool stuff they did, whether they remember it or not.
- Hey, thanks for inviting me to your wife's birthday party. I had a lot of fun. But could you please remove my pic from your Facebook post?
- Why did you show up in the first place? OR You're in a lot of the pics; I can't remove all of them. OR Are you too good to be seen in pics with my wife and her friends? OR Are you hiding from the law? Did you murder someone?
I feel like photos are nothing special, a lot of the friction/anger people are just responding to perceiving an accusatory tone. (But I'm willing to let the odd photo slide, so maybe dropping the worst arguments made life easier)
Weird and potentially dangerous as well. When I was a child, adults warned us about "stranger danger", but now parents advertise their children to potentially dangerous strangers…
What I find truly weird is how many people there are that don't find it "weird" or at all concerning in any way to openly share such photos so freely.
The typical security precautions are very hard to maintain in real life. e.g. should your child win some spelling context or a regional crosscountry run or whatever, how would you explain to them that their name and photo are not appearing among all the other winners?
I'm reminded of the scene from Jurassic park, where nedry is chastised for using a man's name during a clandestine meeting at a restaurant, and nedry yells out "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares!"
Same. There is something unsettling about willfully pushing kids into the attention economy, it can't be good for mental health long term and definitely assists nefarious actors build permanent profiles of them.
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As long as everyone has an Apple device it just works, and I assume there is probably a similar way to do this with a Google photo album (although I will say, I think Google is way more likely to do something sketchy like default everything to public or make it easy for someone to publish content accidentally).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a parent this really stands out. I have a kid around that age and almost his entire "serious" knowledge comes from home. He does pick a lot from other kids at school but in a very abstract way.
When I think about what is on his mind compared to what you painted there, the difference is mind-blowing. A good illustration of the dangers of social media for people —of all age— who lack guidance and perspective.
What in the absolute fuck.
That's monstrous
I believe that you have taken the position that this child is really experiencing gender dysphoria, but it's at least an equally plausible scenario that the parents are responsible for that too.
This is a serious hole in the argument for providing gender affirming care to children in an attempt to reduce harm. The trans-activist community is becoming complicit in child abuse when it denies the existence of this problem.
I actually do work in the space of telling the stories of trans folks (although not involving kids because obviously) and even with adults we still take crazy precautions. I push hard even when we get someone who doesn't want to be anonymous because you can't put that cat back in the bag and being a google search from being outed will haunt you if you ever want to "go stealth."
Exactly! This seems so incredibly obvious, and I was stunned by the thousands of followers on the page who seemed to nonchalantly view this kid's privacy and wellbeing as a worthy sacrifice for supposed "trans activism." Especially since there were quite a few negative comments from trans individuals pointing out why this was wrong and a major violation of the girl's rights.
Stories about trans kids are very important to tell, and they can be wonderful tools to encourage empathy and understanding. But they deserve the utmost caution and respect when handling them, especially when there is the complication of people being able to profit off the children.
The other startling thing about the page was the mom's complete lack of interest in shielding details such as what school or hospital the girl went to. It seemed wildly dangerous to publicly proclaim your child to be a member of an endangered minority who often faces hate crimes, and then tell the world exactly which elementary school they attend. Talk about a great way to bait nut-jobs.
I realize I sound very twisted talking about those sorts of possibilities, but as someone who works in cybersecurity, I have just seen too many creeps commit too many crimes.
I would absolutely love to see a policy that forbids the sharing of photos of children, and any identifying details of children, to a public audience. If people want to share those things with their direct network, then sure. But it seems a wild violation of personal rights to be able to share those personal details about another human being to the entire internet, when the child is far too young to consent.
Jazz in particular has been treated terribly. He's been physically and mentally destroyed by his family and his clinicians, brainwashed from age 2 or 3 into believing he was supposed to be a girl. This nightmare is all he's ever known. There will be no happy ending either, just misery and the shock of realizing his life is a travesty.
His show should be watched as a dire warning against the medical abuse of children.
Unfortunately, it seemed CPS had cleared her. At the time (this was back in ~2017), I shared the page with a friend who works alongside CPS, and she grudgingly agreed there wasn't really anything CPS could do. The kid seemed to have legitimate medical diagnoses, and the mom could easily argue in court that she was just "documenting her daughter's medical journey."
I can't seem to find the page now, which I'm hoping means it got shut down. Fingers crossed that little girl has found health, happiness, and the privacy she deserves.
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https://www.stitcher.com/show/some-place-under-neith
- I agree that parents who publicize their children on social media are massive creep in my opinion, who do a massive invasion of the child privacy. That should almost be illegal in my opinion since the child can't consent.
- At the same time saying that no skin should ever be shown ever because "it titills sexual creeps" is a dark road that points in a direction which in some places ends up at covering the faces of women for the exact same reason. Should we forbid children to go to the pool because sexual creeps might go there ?
On the other hand in many places of Northern europe nudity is more common even in public. That works because they don't culturally associate as much nudity with sex as americans or other parts of the world do.. (You'd obviously get beaten up for masturbating in these places especially with children around.). And that doesn't seem like so bad a thing to me
It’s entirely different than standard social standards about clothing and nudity in public.
I'm talking about intentionally filming one's own children for the viewership of creeps online for perpetual consumption in order to make a profit. This would be akin to making one's living by nonconsensually filming nude beach visitors in northern europe for 8 hrs+/day and uploading that online vs someone just visiting a nude beach.
I would be happy with a law forbidding to post public pictures of your underage kids, regardless of skin exposure.
Genuine Q: at what point can the child consent? A lot of people here are talking about a media blackout of their children since the child can't consent, but when does that end? Can a 5-year-old consent to have their pictures posted online? 10? 15?
I don’t suggest that, but I think it’s pretty bad to post lots of swimsuit pics to social media. And it’s absolutely horrible to accept money in exchange for 1:1 videos or commissioned photos for internet strangers. There’s no legitimate purposes for adults to ask little kids to pose on swimsuits for them. I’m not sure if it should be illegal, but certainly scorned and people who practice to have appropriate levels of opprobrium.
It's significant easier to hone your creepiness when you have an endless supply of training-material. It might even help you to discover this side of you in the first place.
> On the other hand in many places of Northern europe nudity is more common even in public.
Not with children. Even in Europe parents are generally quite protective with them. And here the topic of family-influencer and sexualization of their children is also a hot topic.
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Sure, it doesn't solve the problem of child videos using other monetization channels like product placement, sponsorships and so on but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Ban the commercialization of videos and images containing kids. No more child actors, singers, models, etc. Remove the child labor law exceptions which have been given to these industries.
If you're posting content to the public (i.e. random strangers), you're on one side of the line. If you're posting content in a controlled manner to people consisting of friends and family you actually know, you're on the other side of the line.
Second step, zero public posts involving children, maybe with some narrow carveouts.
There should be a general blanket ban on parents monetizing their kids. We don't need child actors in movies, most stories can be written to avoid their necessity. And maybe very soon, it should be feasible to replace child actors with CGI.
And this legalized pedophilia industry makes 5 billion dollars a year[3]. Unbelievable.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/teen-bea...
[2] https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report
[3] https://truthout.org/articles/child-beauty-pageants-a-scene-...
So maybe access to videos of lightly dressed children, icky as it may feel, lowers the rate of pedophile rape.
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> 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.
There is a section "Applicable legislation":
> 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.
> 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.
Which then goes into the specifics for Europe and the United States.
You know this framing is BS because they'd all scream bloody murder if monetizing that content were outlawed. It's not about pride in their children, it's about monetizing their children. Of course it's no surprise that somebody psychopathic enough to do this to their kids would also be comfortable lying about their motivation.
Usually these types of behaviors are accelerated with some kind of pharmaceuticals.
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.
I guess the easy way to make that distinction would be if your content is "monetized" but even then it seems like there are many loopholes and gotchas.
A simpler definition could be how a content is meant to be spread; whether it is "broadcast" vs. "multicast/unicast".
Like, I cannot think of any legitimate reasons a kid's "performance" needs to be on tiktok. Facebook/whatsapp, maybe, if you're sharing it only with your friends, or even YouTube with linked-only if you want to send the link to grandma. But why would you ever want to publicly post a video of your child for five million+ viewers?
When you do it on an account that makes money or is even tangentially involved with making money.
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Like, do we want to make a rule that a family drama must be filmed without showing that family's kids? If not, then we have to permit child acting at least in some way.
I think that the solution is to have all such people register with no exceptions. Just make X and Y and Z high enough that it excludes the large majority of people.
These people should probably be shamed publicly for this kind of exploitation, for sure. And things like the Coogan law should be applied when the kids are a big part of the brand.
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.
If you're thinking of daddyofive, IIRC they had the two kids who were from the dad's previous marriage taken away and put in their bio mom's custody. They were then charged with child neglect and restricted from uploading footage of their kids. They ignored that restriction with no consequences though.
That was the Daddyofive/Familyofive situation. IIRC they eventually ended up loosing custody of all their kids.