Recent documentaries like Hulu’s Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke and Netflix’s Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing should have society — or at least social media — shook. Both projects shine a spotlight on abuses of minors in the hugely popular family-vlogging space. Behind the shiny-happy presentation of children, tweens and teens is a mostly-unregulated environment that can bend (if not completely breaks) child labor laws, enable online predators and create unknown damage to the psyche of developing brains.
Instagram and YouTube are where most of these parents offend, two activists featured in Bad Influence, which examines troubling behind-the-scenes behavior of adults involved with Piper Rockelle’s popular YouTube channel, mainly her “momager” Tiffany Smith, told The Hollywood Reporter. Though YouTube gets the most play in the documentaries (and for good reason: the 20-year-old site with 20 billion videos gets the largest share of TV viewership of any media company, including Disney), Instagram may be the more potentially-dangerous platform, both experts said, as it allows an account’s followers to pay for walled content — with some restrictions.
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Chris McCarty, the founder of Quit Clicking Kids, said it is “particularly concerning when you have exclusive content of kids that is behind a paywall — the implications of that are pretty serious.”
As of April 2024, Instagram does not allow accounts that predominantly post photos of children to monetize exclusive content. Such accounts cannot receive gifts or receive badges (both are Instagram currency), a Meta spokesperson told THR.
The platform’s introduction of “Teen Accounts” in September 2024 added more privacy and messaging restrictions, the spokesperson said. (Anyone under 18 is automatically enrolled in a Teen Account, though 16- and 17-year-olds can then opt out; kids under 16 need a parent’s permission to opt out of a Teen Account.)
In a separate conversation with THR, Sarah Adams, the founder of Kids Are Not Content who goes by mom.uncharted on social media, called Instagram “particularly bad because … there’s a lot of predators on there.”
From October-December 2024, Instagram removedtwo million pieces of child-exploitation content from Instagram, over 99 percent of which was found proactively before being reported.
Users as young as 13 can create their own Instagram accounts, but minor-created accounts have never had a monetization option available to them. Children under 13 are allowed to have a “presence” on Instagram, but the account must be “actively managed by a parent or manager, who is responsible for the account’s content, privacy settings and interactions with others,” the spokesperson said.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, says it takes child safety very seriously. Instagram uses “technology to prevent potentially suspicious adults from interacting with teen accounts, and with accounts that predominantly feature minors,” the company said.
Like Instagram, 13-year-olds can set up their own YouTube channel; children under 13 can have a “supervised” channel linked to a parent’s channel. Unlike Instagram, there are no paywalls on YouTube channels.
“We want creators to have fun and be creative, but they must also follow ourCommunity Guidelines,Creator Responsibilitypolicies and applicable laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle told THR. “If we see that a creator’s on- and/or off-platform behavior is harmful to the wider YouTube community we take swift action.”
Swift action here included a 2022 indefinite suspension of monetization on Piper Rockelle’s channel for off-platform behavior. And in August 2023, the month Franke was arrested (and later pled guilty to) child abuse charges, YouTube terminated two channels linked to her.
“YouTube developed a set ofquality principlesto help guide YouTube’s kids and family creators,” Bullwinkle continued. “These principles were developed in partnership with child development specialists, and are based on extensive research.”
McCarty’s and Adams’ respective websites are considered sister sites in the fight against the exploitation of children on social media. They share a similar cause — one we should all share, frankly — but approach the problem differently.
McCarty, a 20-year-old Political Science and Chinese double-major honors student at the University of Washington (Seattle), became appalled by the lack of accountability in the space after reading about Myka and James Stauffer, married midwest family vloggers who shared the process of adopting a two-year-old special needs child from China with their substantial YouTube audience. Two-and-a-half years later, they essentially gave the child back, citing an inability to meet all of his needs. The swift online backlash is chronicled in HBO documentary series An Update on Our Family.
Then 17, McCarty began cold-calling and cold-emailing Washington state legislators, pushing a homemade policy to combat such exploitative “sharenting” (a term first coined in the Wall Street Journal in 2010). LOL, teenagers, right? Except this teenager’s optimism and passion (mixed with, yes, some healthy naiveté) worked.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone to take me up on that,” McCarty said, “but they did!”
Though McCarty’s bill was first introduced in Washington state (as HB 2032), it was first picked up in Illinois (SB 1782), where it received bipartisan, unanimous support. Other states (and that bipartisan, unanimous support) followed, including California (SB764), arguably the most important state for all of this. McCarty’s lobbying efforts there coincided with the release of the Demi Lovato cautionary-documentary Child Star, which featured McCarty.
“I don’t know how the universe worked out that way, but it did,” McCarty said. “There’s this really great photo of [Lovato] being there at the bill-signing with Gov. Gavin Newsom. It was really a satisfying moment to look at that and think, ’Oh, I helped put those two people together in that room.’”
McCarty’s bill has two primary components: 1) It ensures a percentage of revenue (at least 15 percent, similar to Hollywood’s Coogan Law) earned from a minor’s participation in social-media videos is set aside for them, and 2) It allows the child performer to request the deletion of content featuring them as a minor when they come of age. As kids, “they couldn’t consent to it,” McCarty argues. Most — but not all — local lawmakers agree on that second piece. Even if YouTube already does.
“YouTube has supported efforts to compensate kids who appear in YouTube content and provide a pathway to remove content made when they were a minor (YouTube already does this voluntarily),” Bullwinkle said.
Don’t freak out on us here, normal parents who share normal stuff about their kids in a normal way on social media: McCarty’s bill only applies to accounts where a minor is featured in 30 percent of the posted videos within the past 30 days and those videos are generating at least 10 cents in revenue per view. As cute as your kids are in their Christmas morning videos, they’re probably not get-you-paid cute.
McCarty’s bill is a great start, but it cannot completely protect kids from parental exploitation in the space. What it can do those is enforce protections on the components of sharenting that are measurable. The government is very interested in how much income one brings in (Meta and YouTube-parent Alphabet are publicly-traded companies; they’ll comply), and it is also not debatable as to when a child becomes an adult — 18, in most countries.
Unfortunately, unlike a film and TV set, that’s about where the protections for vlogging must feasibly end. (Not that protections for children on film and TV sets have been perfected: ID’s Quiet on Set showed us that there is still a lot of room for improvement even within the Hollywood studio system.)
McCarty wishes the bill could “require set teachers or regulated work hours,” but neither McCarty or Adams see how that can be enforced when the filming in question is done among family, by family and often within the family home.
“I think it would be very difficult to get into the homes and monitor how much these kids are working,” Adams, said. “Some [family vloggers] would argue that [the kids] are not working — they’re just filming their life.”
And that argument would be nonsense in the cases we’re discussing: scaled-up, monetized family vlogs.
“Trust me, these kids are acting. They know when the camera is on that they have to perform, they have to say something cute. Who knows what that’s doing to their psyche as they develop a sense of self and always have to feel like they’re in performance mode?” Adams said. “But when it comes to regulating, like the labor kids, or like the schooling hours, I think it would be extremely difficult on a state or federal level.”
So instead, Adams, 39, is more interested in shifting the culture of sharenting than the laws against it. Her approach is a pragmatic one (perhaps that comes to us all with age, for better or for worse).
“If I can help parents look through a different lens at this — in the way they share their kids, in the way they consume content online — then that’s what I can offer,” she said.
