The entertainment industry needs to better protect underage creators

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Family vloggers on YouTube have always rubbed me the wrong way. Granted, as a general rule of thumb, the content that children consume on the platform shouldn’t be considered educational or stimulating. Mental health experts have actually deemed much of it dangerous. But the impact of media on children expands beyond what kids are watching – it’s also about the content that kids are making and appearing in, often against their will.

Parents and family members who are supposed to protect their children, who should be looking out for their safety and well-being, are now exposing them to audiences on the internet for engagement, views and profit.

Until recently, Ruby Franke was one of these parents, documenting the lives of her then-husband and family on the YouTube channel 8 Passengers, where she prominently featured her six children. Since 2022, she’s also worked as a mental health coach and ran a channel about parenting with her business partner Jodi Nan Hildebrandt. Hildebrandt has notably been accused of using her license irresponsibility, like misdiagnosing men with porn or sex addictions. Both channels have since been deleted and scrubbed from the platform.

But as far back as 2020, Franke has faced several allegations of child abuse: threatening to restrict food, banning one of her sons from his bedroom for seven months to punish him for pranking his brothers and forbidding her two youngest children from receiving Christmas presents because they were being “selfish,” according to CBSNews.

It turns out, though, that that was just the tip of the iceberg. In August 2023, Franke’s 12-year-old son climbed out of Hildebrandt’s house through a window and ran to the neighbor’s house to ask for food and water. When the neighbor saw that he had duct tape on his ankles and wrists, they called the police, who rescued him and his 10-year-old sister. Immediately, they were taken to the hospital to treat their open wounds, emaciation and malnourishment.

Later in court, it was discovered that Franke and Hildebrandt tortured the two children regularly, forcing them to do manual labor, refusing to give them food and water, binding their hands and feet and treating their injuries with cayenne pepper and honey, among other horrifying allegations. This past month, they were convicted of child abuse and will now each face up to 30 years in prison.

It’s important to acknowledge that not every family vlogging channel ends up this way. In fact, for the most part, vlogging in general, which is designed to take viewers through a creator’s daily life, seems innocent enough. Even family vlogging, when done safely and correctly, can offer genuine advice for viewers who are also trying to navigate parenthood, like how to pack your child’s lunch or help with homework when they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Especially in Western societies like the United States, parenting can be lonely and isolating without help from a supportive family network. Those feelings can drive people to seek visibility and empathy from outside sources like family vlogging channels or its earlier predecessor, the mommy blog.

It starts to get complicated, however, when kids – and money – get involved.

For one, kids don’t have the legal power to consent to how their image is being captured or shared, causing parents alone to be responsible for their privacy when they’re minors. While this is undoubtedly a protective safeguard, it can present a serious ethical issue when parents or guardians are the ones exploiting them for content. Legally, they can simply give themselves permission to do so, as there are also no labor laws regarding working conditions for child influencers.

And while we might know plenty of toddlers under the age of two who can say “no,” it’s rare for adults to take those boundaries seriously even as kids get older. Other times, however, they don’t have the language to consent to begin with, much less the emotional capacity to understand what’s happening. They’re forced to participate as objects in their own lives and made to believe by the adults in their lives that whatever they feel has no importance or weight. That makes it easier for parents to inflict emotional abuse and take advantage of their child’s inability to advocate for themselves because of their age.

It also makes it easy to make huge profits, as there are currently no laws protecting the monetary earnings of children who appear in their family’s YouTube videos, with the exception of Illinois, which passed such a law shortly after Franke was arrested.

This is a stark difference to child actors under California’s Coogan Law, whose wages are set aside in a trust that they can access when they’re 18. Studios also have to adhere to strict guidelines to ensure that they don’t work over a certain amount of hours per day and still attend school.

But, if we’re being honest, all these different kinds of family content – mommy blogs, family vlogs, Instagram momfluencers – aren’t too different from the conditions child actors face in Hollywood. Even with legal protections, they are often at the mercy of predatory authority figures, are subjected to emotional and physical abuse and can struggle to adjust to normal adulthood or abuse substances. We’ve seen it happen to countless Disney and Nickelodeon stars and we are seeing the same things being replicated in the new generation of child influencers with little signs of improvement or cultural change.

If politicians are going to guarantee the safety and well-being of the next generation, they need to implement stricter regulations by expanding laws similar to Coogan into social media work – recognizing child influencers as professional workers, giving children the ability to benefit monetarily from the content they’re featured in and keeping those funds separate from their parents.

One major problem is that, unlike mainstream entertainment, family vlogging often takes place in the private sphere of the home, which makes it difficult for governments to regulate. Still, there are a myriad of ways to protect children while making content – or, of course, just listen when they say no.

Sofia Aguilar is a first-year grad student in the Library and Information Science program. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected].