Family Influencing: When small children are profile-defining

When adults or adolescents gain fame through social media appearances and want to monetize them, the youngest are often brought into the picture – and often with full intention. The Leibniz Institute for Media Research has now examined 10,000 posts from 359 German influencer profiles with small children and babies.

The results are devastating: According to the researchers, small children and babies on social media appearances raise significant legal and ethical questions. Data protection law, the right to one's own image, and the familial and personal privacy of children are particularly affected, and the monetization of children and their life worlds can collide with protection needs.

Child's welfare or financial interest

“Parental duty of care is reaching its structural limits due to conflicting economic interests,” the researchers write. In other words, the child's welfare is at least partially subordinated to financial interests.

Among other things, the researchers criticize that even when problems become known, the responsibility of the authorities can be unclear or at least vary greatly. They recommend, among other things, administrative guidelines for data protection, media supervision, trade supervision, and youth welfare authorities.

For their study, the researchers systematically examined the 305 profiles of 201 of these influencers with toddlers. 182 of the profiles examined were on Instagram, 113 on TikTok, and 64 on YouTube.

The majority of parents apparently try to obscure their children's identities – with moderate success. Camera angles, overlays, and pixelation were often not enough: children are “identifiable in about a third of the posts, especially on high-reach accounts, with 0- to 2-year-old children being overrepresented,” the study states. In a quarter of the posts examined featuring them, the children were the central element of the video.

The younger the children were, the higher the number of likes on the posts – but this correlation should be treated with caution statistically, according to the researchers. “Among the top 25 influencers, over 52 percent of the profiles contain identifiable depictions of children, with around 35 percent being identifiable children under two years old,” the study says.

Media authorities warn of sleep deprivation

The clients for the study were the state media authorities of Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, Berlin-Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine-Westphalia. The State Media Authority Hamburg-Schleswig-Holstein also provides recommendations for parents.

Among other things, the media authority warns that “days of video shoots without the possibility of child-appropriate play and with sleep deprivation” can constitute a threat to a child's well-being, and advises: “Absolutely accept it if your child does not want to participate.”

(mki)