The fabulous business life of Kid Influencers

The life of minors in the world of social media has increasingly transformed into a media exposure of their daily life, their habits, moments of happiness in the family.

 If years ago the real influencers were mostly adults specialized in various types of content, today some of them have grown up and have extended their work to their families, making it a completely normal business.

Child labor has different protections in different countries and certainly until a few years ago no one could have foreseen such a rapid expansion of content relating to minors through social networks. Daily posts, stories, reels, films that show daily life, well-coated, and artfully interspersed with perfect clothes, new shoes, furnishings for the baby's room, family trips with spaces dedicated to children.

On the one hand there is a lot of ingenuity on the part of the creators, on the other this ingenuity borders or can border on a story studied at the table ready to be told and consequently sold to followers unaware of the potentially devastating effect that a continuous exposure to social media can generate on minors.

Not only on the children of influencers but also and above all on users, emulators of the behavior of their favorites, who find it perfectly normal to share photos, videos and situations of their children's daily life, some looking for a potential source of income, others simply for pure exhibitionism and narcissism, to the detriment of those who do not have the tools to decide or oppose.

What protections exist for minors exposed and used as an advertising medium in Europe?

What does a client company risk commissioning a series of contents concerning minors to an influencer, if the basic rules of the use of minors are violated?

At the moment the closest laws are those relating to the rules applied to children and minors in the world of show business and entertainment (for example the use, both with limits of hours and time slots, used for television or for films and TV series) generally. However, the legislation is not automatically extended to the world of social media, which still experience a dangerous legal gap, putting minors in a difficult and dangerous position.

The minor usually has to rely on the common sense of the parent in charge who will decide how much to make him work (and it will be difficult to count the hours on a platform that allows you to release images and content even if not live). for a maximum number of hours per day and per week.

Even if a national legislation in some places begins to exist, even if not yet sufficient to protect in detail exposure of the privacy and identity of the minor, hours worked and protection of profits deriving from social networks (as for example in France, where it has been able to at least protect minors in the event of income earned - which will be protected from the use and abuse of their parents until they come of age), the platform assumes no responsibility deriving from the use or abuse of the minor and does not judge the appropriateness or less than the contents posted concerning minors, except for openly censoring contents defined as unacceptable and examined by specialized teams of individuals who view hundreds of reckless and therefore censored violent scenes every day.

To date both tik tok and instagram, to name the most popular, unload all kinds of responsibilities on parents, avoiding taking sides in any way for the protection or otherwise of the subject of the hours uploaded with photos and videos.

And even if the same French rule were extended to other European states or other international contexts, it would in part simply be disregarded by the practice, at least in the part in which the platform is obliged to remove content concerning a minor who requests it. Because once shared, saved thousands of times by private users, those contents will remain and it will be practically impossible to destroy them all, even if the right to be forgotten remains a central theme both for the development of the individual and for the protection of his fundamental right to privacy. privacy.

Furthermore, the rule would not be sufficient to protect emulators, ordinary people who, seeing fame and potential success in the use of their children's images, share their images and videos frequently and recklessly, regardless of a real economic result deriving from their visibility.

The themes are therefore many: the fragility of the subject used and exposed, his right to privacy, the transparency of earnings and income in favor of the minor. But also the use of social media by those minors who want to recognize themselves in kid influencers and to whom this message is more directed.

While often prohibiting the online presence of individual users under the age of 13, there is no policy in the main social media that governs the boundaries of the use of so-called Kidfluencers for commercial purposes and generally associated with profiles that generate views and profits for their respective families.

However, the American FTC has repeatedly underlined the serious extent of the expansion of the digital medium concerning minors, not only on the part of the creators but also on that of the users. In the last conference on the subject, he pointed out in particular how much the social gap of some less well-off groups can affect the unregulated and inadequately prepared use of IT and social media, to the point of dangerously blurring the line between what is real and what is instead it is not.