When adults or adolescents gain notoriety through social media presences and are able to monetize them, the youngest ones sometimes come into the picture – and often on purpose. The Leibniz Institute for Media Research has now examined 10,000 posts from 359 German influencer profiles with small children and babies.
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The results are devastating: small and very young children on social media sites would raise significant legal and ethical questions, according to the researchers. In particular, data protection law, personal rights and children’s familial and personal privacy are affected and the monetization of children and their living environments can coexist with protection needs.
Child welfare or financial interest
“The parental duty of care reaches structural limits due to conflicting economic interests,” write the researchers. In other words: the child’s well-being is at least partially subordinated to financial interests.
The researchers complain, among other things, that even when problems become known, the authority’s responsibility can be unclear or at least vary greatly. Among other things, they recommend administrative guidelines for data protection, media supervision, trade supervision and youth authorities.
For their study, the researchers systematically examined the 305 profiles of 201 of these influencers with small children. 182 of the profiles examined were on Instagram, 113 on TikTok and 64 on YouTube.
The majority of parents apparently try to make it unrecognizable – with moderate success. Camera angles, overlays and pixelation are often not enough: children are “identifiable in about a third of the posts, especially in high-reach accounts, with 0 to 2-year-old children being overrepresented,” according to the study. In a quarter of the examined contributions with them, the children were a central part of the video.
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The younger the children were, the higher the number of likes on the posts – but this connection should be treated with caution statistically, according to the researchers. “For the top 25 influencers, over 52 percent of the profiles contain identifiable child depictions, around 35 percent of which include identifiable children under the age of two,” according to the study.
Media outlets warn of sleep deprivation
The study was commissioned by the state media authorities of Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, Berlin-Brandenburg, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. The Hamburg-Schleswig-Holstein State Media Authority also provides recommendations for parents.
The media authority warns, among other things, that “day-long video shoots without the opportunity to play in a child-friendly way and with the acceptance of a sleep deficit” could pose a risk to children’s well-being and advises: “Be sure to accept if your child does not want to take part.”
(wpl)
