Summer 2024 Issue

At Risk Youth: Labor Protections for Child Influencers and Children of Social Media Influencers
By Sarah Tennenhaus, LMSW
Social Work Today
Vol. 24 No. 3 P. 30

The potential harms to children from social media use are widely known and much discussed: anxiety, cyberbullying, and attentional difficulties, among others. But an additional danger to children exists that’s increasingly relevant and demands our attention: the risk of exploitation of influencer children. No federal legal standard exists to protect children who create or appear in social media content from being harmed or taken advantage of. It’s an issue that should be a priority for all concerned about child welfare in the information age.

Influencing
The rise of social media usage has spawned a new form of marketing known as “influencing.” This marketing avenue capitalizes on the social media audiences of individual creators by compensating them through partnerships, ad placement, or sponsorships.1 Influencing allows advertisers to essentially “borrow” an audience by paying to place products and services in front of that audience. In this way, opportunities once limited to celebrities and athletes have become available to anyone with a large or engaged audience. In fact, the evidence suggests that consumers favor the endorsement of social media personalities over the endorsements of traditional celebrities.2

Online consumers will recognize conventions typical in the influencing industry: Influencers often specialize in niche content areas such as fashion, wellness, or parenting. They frequently share curated aspects of their personal lives alongside their niche content, maintaining audience interest and a veneer of “authenticity” and trustworthiness. These personal disclosures create a context for forming parasocial relationships between influencers and their audiences; consumers of social media content become emotionally invested in the personal lives of the personalities they follow and ascribe trustworthiness, credibility, and expertise to these individuals.3

Influencers often feature their children in their content. Additionally, so-called “kidfluencers” are children who have a social media following themselves, generally managed by a parent or guardian to circumvent age limits on social media platforms. The influencing market in the United States is worth $21.1 billion and presents a phenomenally lucrative opportunity for influencers with large and engaged audiences.4 Yet virtually no labor protections exist on the state or federal level to prevent harm and exploitation of children used in social media content creation. Given the size and scope of this relatively new industry, child welfare professionals and legal authorities must consider the risks of harm to children in this industry.

Risks to Influencer Children
Parents are not obligated to share social media earnings with their children (with the exception of Illinois, discussed below). This puts children at risk of being exploited to create lucrative content at the expense of their own pursuits while never being paid for their labor.

These factors create a risk of physical and psychological harm to children. Children are often overwhelmed by the demands on their time and energy, the lack of privacy, and the demand to perform for an internet audience.5 Parents and guardians are incentivized to compromise their children’s privacy for the sake of creating compelling—thus lucrative—content. Children’s milestones and personal struggles—everything from tantrums to puberty to learning disabilities—can be monetized and shared widely.

Lack of Child Labor Protections
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established labor protections for children in the United States. The law was intended to protect children from “oppressive” labor conditions that put them at risk of physical harm or prevented them from getting an education. The law outlawed most employment for children younger than 14 and implemented limitations on employment for those 14 to 17 years of age.6

The Fair Labor Standards Act did not address child employment in the entertainment industry, leaving those restrictions to the states. Over time, various states have implemented restrictions for children working in entertainment, notably including the Coogan Law in California, which requires employers of child performers to set aside a minimum of 15% of the child’s earnings for the child to access when they become an adult.7 Various states have implemented similar requirements, as well as work permit requirements and restrictions on hours, times, and locations where child entertainers may work.

Social media content creation defies the bounds of the entertainment industry. Due to its often casual and “unscripted” nature, social media content creation generally happens in the children’s homes or in the context of the family. Even if state-level entertainment labor restrictions were to apply, their lack of uniformity across states would undermine their practical impact on the lives of influencer-children, as they are easy enough to circumvent through a change of location.

The Ruby Franke Story
The concern that influencer-children are at risk for exploitation is not far-fetched. The case of Ruby Franke, a parenting influencer who has pled guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse, is an extreme example of how children can be harmed by parents who use them to produce content. Franke produced a YouTube channel from 2015 to 2022 showcasing her authoritarian parenting techniques, including confiscating a child’s bedroom for seven months, having her son sleep on a beanbag in the family room, and threatening to cut off a child’s stuffed animal’s head with scissors as punishment. Franke essentially monetized her parenting techniques; the family’s channel, “8 Passengers,” amassed millions of followers. In May 2020, her followers signed a petition asking Utah Child Protective Services to investigate the Franke home for potential child abuse. While no charges were filed at the time, Franke closed her YouTube channel and pivoted to “mental health coaching” in partnership with another social media personality, Jodi Hildebrandt, who practiced as a mental health counselor. On August 30, 2023, one of Franke’s minor children escaped Hildebrandt’s home, where he was being detained, and fled to a neighbor to call the police; according to reports, he was emaciated and had visible open wounds. Further details emerged following Franke’s and Hildebrandt’s arrests, detailing extreme physical abuse of Franke’s youngest two children, including forced labor, suffocation, and isolation. Both women were sentenced to “four consecutive prison sentences of one to 15 years” but will only serve up to 30 years per Utah state law.8

The Illinois Law
The state of Illinois is the first state to pass a law requiring influencer children to be compensated for their labor.9 The law requires that children appearing in at least 30% of photo or video content in a 30-day period or whose name is used in a social media post must be paid for their labor if the content is monetized.

The Illinois law is an important precedent that hopefully will inspire other states to follow suit. The website Quit Clicking Kids, created by University of Washington student Chris McCarty, provides updated information about current attempts to pass laws in several states protecting child influencers. The website also provides information about research and advocacy on this issue.10 Piecemeal protections for child influencers are a start, but they fall short of providing universal and consistent protections for children in the influencing space. The federal government must establish clear protections for children who labor in this industry. A uniform federal standard requiring parents to report and protect their children’s earnings would go a long way toward protecting children from potential exploitation by their parents.

A Complex Issue
Regulating social media content creation is complex. Child-influencers do not have regular work hours or dedicated workspaces, such as studios or stages. Content is typically created in the home, and parental rights to raise their children as they see fit must also be respected. Though influencer parents may be incentivized to overshare details of their children’s lives to sustain interest in their social media content, the same may be true for parents who do not profit from their social media presence. Though children may look back as teenagers or adults in mortification for how they were used as props to create revenue, this issue is not limited to influencing.11 All children whose lives are shared on social media may be followed for the rest of their lives by what was shared about them, affecting their educational, professional, and romantic opportunities. Creating an online record of a child’s life may also compromise their safety by providing details that can be exploited by predators.12 Laws protecting the “right to be forgotten” by mandating the deletion of a social media record on the request of the child may be a potential solution but don’t yet exist in the United States.13

An actionable and immediately necessary first step is a federal law protecting the earnings of child-influencers. Like the Coogan Law of California, which was emulated or adopted by other states, the law must require influencer-parents to pay their children for their part in content creation. Parents should be required to maintain reportable records of their children’s time and labor. When a parent earns money off a social media post starring their child, that child is working. As former child star and California legislator Sheila James Kuehl said, “It is not play if you’re making money off it.”14

— Sarah Tennenhaus, LMSW, is a second-year doctoral student of social welfare at Yeshiva University. She’s a program coordinator at a national nonprofit supporting people affected by health crises and was a school-based speech-language pathologist for six years.

References
1. Leung FF, Gu FF, Palmatier RW. Online influencer marketing. J Acad Market Sci. 2022;50(2):1-26.

2. Jin SV, Muqaddam A, Ryu E. Instafamous and social media influencer marketing. Mark Intell Plan. 2019;37(5):567-579.

3. Yuksel M, Labrecque LI. “Digital buddies”: Parasocial interactions in social media. J Res Interact Mark. 2016;10(4):305-320.

4. Dencheva V. Influencer marketing market size worldwide from 2016 to 2024. Statista website. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092819/global-influencer-market-size/. Published February 6, 2024.

5. Haile N. The death hoax of a child influencer: Lil Tay's recent infamy shines a light on a bigger problem. Salon. August 18, 2023. https://www.salon.com/2023/08/17/lil-tay-child-influencers/

6. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. S 1060. 117th Cong (1938).

7. California Child Actor’s Bill. S 6752. (1939).

8. Schoenbaum H. YouTube mom Ruby Franke apologizes at sentencing in child abuse case. Associated Press website. https://apnews.com/article/ruby-franke-youtube-child-abuse-sentencing-4f4985c1cab9243d4eaf8b6a58f087ed. Updated February 20, 2024.

9. Yang A. Illinois passed a law to protect child influencers. Advocates are cautiously optimistic more states will follow. NBC News. August 15, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/child-influencers-law-illinois-reaction-rcna99831

10. Quit Clicking Kids website. https://quitclickingkids.com/take-action/

11. Lindsay K. The first social-media babies are growing up–and they’re horrified. The Atlantic. May 23, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/parents-posting-kids-online-tiktok-social-media/674137/

12. Minkus T, Liu K, Ross KW. Children seen but not heard: when parents compromise children's online privacy. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web. May 2015. pp. 776-786.

13. Latifi F. “Right to be forgotten” bill to be introduced in Maryland to protect children of influencers. Teen Vogue. December 15, 2023. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/right-to-be-forgotten-bill-maryland-children-of-influencers

14. Wong JC. ‘It’s not play if you’re making money’: how Instagram and YouTube disrupted child labor laws. The Guardian. April 14, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/24/its-not-play-if-youre-making-money-how-instagram-and-youtube-disrupted-child-labor-laws