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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
I bet once you removed the financial incentive a lot of this over sharing of kids’ lives would mostly stop.
Social media, while not permanent, can be long lasting, and can have a chilling effect on a child’s future agency.
Guarding it until they can make their own decisions is what all good parents ought to do.
How is this not obvious and common sense?
People adopt. Some people purposely adopt kids that they know have special needs. Sometimes, people with the best intentions, end up in a situation where they are way over their heads. Before you're actually in the situation, there's no possible way to know how difficult it will be, nor what your limits are. (And until you've seen someone actually overwhelmed, it's hard to even imagine what that looks like.) If a child's needs are beyond your limits, you are doing them absolutely no favors to keep them in your home. Having any child, even one biologically your own, is fundamentally a risk.
So consider some hypotheses:
A. The couple in question genuinely wanted to help a child who needed help; and genuinely wanted to inspire other people to adopt by sharing the sorrows and joys; but unexpectedly found themselves in over their head, and made the difficult (and publicly embarrassing) decision to pass the child on to someone better suited to care for them
B. The couple in question thought that a good way to make a few bucks would be to adopt a difficult child for 6 months, get a large viewership, and then pass them on to someone else
I mean, I suppose B is possible, but it seems like a really dumb way to go about things. There would certainly be lots of easier ways to make money.
Whether it was right to make a public spectacle of the child's situation, even assuming the best intentions, is a different question.
In other words, there's a third option other than "malice" and "good intentions": narcissism.
But the most important thing, as the other commenter says: making a public spectacle of the child's situation is the question that's being asked here. And it's an important question because the ability to make a public spectacle might be the difference between some people getting kids or not.
Um....disagree. That's literally THE question being discussed.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...
"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.
It's not positive, but it's "I have a splinter in my finger" relatively to what many (most?) children experience who don't grow up in the top 1%.
There's another post on the front page currently about over 100 kids who were illegally employed in hazardous jobs, and yesterday we had an article about laws being proposed to remove the hourly limits on child labor. I think the children affected by those things would prefer to have had their face on their mommy's instagram and never have to work a day in their life over working in a meat sanitation plant from their 13th birthday on.
It's all relative, but I guess that's an unpopular opinion. Maybe most here feel closer to the kids on instagram than those in the meat packing plant.
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?
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.
>Once, she told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for “nice things.”
Yeah, lots of people find happiness in things done with consent. Those same people find unhappiness, resentment, and anger when those same things are done without consent.
Consent matters!
Children are not born owing their parents anything.
This take is disgusting, frankly, because it ignores the core issue: that it was nonconsensual. It would be like commenting on a marital rape story "but many wives love having sex with their husband!"
The article says that this child is considering cutting off all contact with her parents when she turns 18 and can move out. Does that sound like happiness to you?
Monetize your kids at your own risk.
Yes they are. That is the function of children with respect to parents in the circle of life, just as it is the function of parents to care for children. Not all obligations are ones you voluntarily undertake.
Of course there are boundaries to the scope of that obligation. But those are defined by society, not "consent." The problem in Claire's story is that the parents are perfectly capable of working but choose to burden her instead.
> 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?
Something being good for parents and siblings does not necessary imply it is good for the kid. The distinction matters. Sometimes it is a balancing acts and other times it is simply an exploitation.
