Lucy, a 10-year-old girl from the UK, told the researchers of the report Life in ‘likes’. Children’s Commissioner report into social media use among 8-12 year olds, that she did not feel good when her parents shared photos of her on social media. “My mum just says ‘give me a photo’, but I don’t like her posting them on social media.
Helen, 8, also tells a similar story in the report: “My mother shared a picture of me with a hamster on my head and that was very embarrassing for me. I was almost naked! Thank goodness at least I had a towel with me”.
Lucy and Helen are not isolated cases. Thousands of parents around the world post photos of their underage children on their social media profiles.
They may not remember how unfunny it was for their own parents to show photos of themselves to family members or even friends. Nor am I sure that the parents who post the photos ask their children whether they are happy for the photos to be shared on their networks and seen by hundreds or thousands of users. There are many cases where the children themselves, being so young, would not even be able to complain.
The study conducted in the UK, which has a number of offices that look after children’s rights and protection and promote critical media literacy, reveals several unseen realities. The first relates to the protection of children from media exposure. The second has to do with the imaginary that conceives of social networks as a safe space for the publication of children’s images. The third has to do with the creation of a need for media exposure of children on social media. Life translated into “likes”.
Not on TV, but on the networks
Media exposure of children is largely regulated. Laws protect minors. Their image and voice cannot be used without their consent or that of their legal representatives. In the case of Spain, for example, Organic Law 1/1996 on the Legal Protection of Minors expressly prohibits the “dissemination of data or images referring to minors in the media when it is contrary to their interests, even with the minor’s consent”.
Article 4 of the Organic Law also states that “minors have the right to honour, to personal and family privacy and to their own image. This right also includes the inviolability of the family home and correspondence, as well as the secrecy of communications”.
The law also states that “the dissemination of information or the use of images or names of minors in the media that may imply an unlawful interference with their privacy, honour or reputation, or that is contrary to their interests, shall require the intervention of the Public Prosecutor’s Office”.
Finally, the Law on the Protection of Minors is clear in stating that “any use of the minor’s image or name in the media which may imply an unlawful interference with his or her honour, personal and family privacy and self-image, or which is contrary to his or her interests, even if the consent of the minor or his or her legal representatives is recorded, shall be considered an unlawful interference with his or her right to honour, personal and family privacy and self-image”.
It is surprising that, if a law applies to the dissemination of the image of a minor in a media such as television, the written press or radio – and that there are sanctions for broadcasters – the same does not apply to social networks when their dissemination potential can exceed the audience ratings of any traditional media.
While in the first case there is a responsibility of the media, and therefore they have – for the moment – an editorial team that prepares and reviews the publications and journalists who know the legislation and develop a professional work with the information, in the second case those responsible for each publication are the users. In this case, the parents.
Media exposure of children is an activity regulated by law. It is not a question of girls not being allowed to be on television or on networks. It is that the law itself protects children from the media ecosystem that surrounds the production of information and entertainment.
Social media is fuelled by content produced by users, most of whom are not information professionals. But we tend to think that the social network is a private -or our own- space, protected and in which we have no responsibility as individual users.
Nor do we as parents if, as in the case of Lucy and Helen, their image, their personal data and their identity are put at risk by violating their privacy as children. Children that all adults must protect.
New media, new threats
According to the UK Children’s Commissioner’s study, a third of internet users are under 18, and three out of four children between the ages of 8 and 12 have their own profiles on social media – someone must allow them to do so at home, or even help or promote them, because the conditions of access to social media platforms require a minimum age of 13 to sign up.
Posting children’s photos on the internet, as well as their identity linked to certain personal data – also protected by numerous data protection laws – makes children vulnerable. As described in the ‘Data Protection’ report, produced by Unicef Argentina, “most children and adolescents (and many of their parents and caregivers) are not aware of the potential risks of sharing personal data on the internet. Many are also unaware that this data is their property and that they have the right to demand that it not be disseminated, rectified or shared with third parties.
The exposure of children’s images and personal data on social networks allows, for example, socially censored practices such as bullying or even the initiation of crimes such as grooming, a process whereby an individual tries to befriend a minor for sexual purposes via the internet.
According to the publication “Child Online Safety. Global Challenges and Strategies” by UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre, “areas of cyberspace that allow sex offenders to target or manipulate potential victims include chat rooms, social networking sites and instant messaging.
It is normal for parents to be careful about the potential dangers in their children’s environment when they are out and about. It is curious that they, the adults, do not recognise the dangers that exist on the internet and particularly on social networking sites for their own children.
The new technological challenges require adult preparation on the part of parents and, above all, a critical reading of the networks themselves on their part. Especially if it is the users, and not a responsible editorial team, who publish the content of the networks. No one is more responsible than parents for the content they themselves publish of their own children. Also about the age at which they start using the networks.
Completely mediatised? Blue pill, red pill
A study published by the journal Informação & Sociedade: Estudos, carried out by researchers from the Communication and Education Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and involving more than a thousand journalism students from 17 Latin American countries, showed that the second main motivation for creating a profile on social networks is fashion or the social status that social media platforms can provide.
Along the same lines, research carried out in the UK showed that boys and girls were aware that they had to stay true to themselves on social media. However, girls were primarily concerned with looking ‘cool’ and boys with feeling ‘cool’ and wearing the right clothes to do so.
At the same time, the boys who participated in the study claimed that social media allowed them to maintain an appearance that was very important to feel social approval and to seek their own identity – a curious contradiction that manifests itself especially when the child starts secondary school.
It seems as if the media ecosystem forces children to take the blue pill – to take on the virtual world, as an illusion – and to condemn the world of childhood under the physical and emotional realities of their own growth – the red pill. But if girls are subject to constant posting by their parents on social networks, almost from birth, what can happen is that they may have a traumatic experience when they cannot be on them.
This is not a dystopia. Experiments in which young people are asked to live 24 hours of their lives without any media exposure have shown this. Some of them even saw death lurking and were unable to finish the 24-hour experiment!
The children, according to the report, confessed that they felt at ease when they received “Likes” from their friends on their networks. Some 11- and 12-year-olds showed signs of dependence on their own “Likes” and admitted to using techniques and strategies to ensure a high number of “Likes” on their posts. The researchers, who conducted focus groups with the children, highlight that some of them begin to view their offline activities according to their potential to be socially shared on their social networks.
Social networks make their users, including children and parents, believe that the possibility of becoming a media celebrity is just a click away. There are cases that prove them right and they, the networks, push users to behave as such. Is it worth taking children to this extreme? What is it that makes us want to be a media celebrity? Living from birth in the virtualised reality of the networks – albeit without virtues – can have two types of consequences for children who today, because of their young age, cannot decide whether or not they want their parents to publish photos and data about them online.
In the first case, as can be seen in the report and in different studies on the use of social networks, children assume that their reality depends on being on the networks. If they are no longer on them, they simply do not exist. They disappear virtually and physically. They are cut off from what is happening in their immediate circles.
In the second case, perhaps with the red pill, they will see their life so mediatised that they will condemn their parents in different ways. The traumatic aspect, in this case, is to see their child or adolescent life published on the web and available to any user. The story of 8-year-old Elsa in the UK report is clear: “Once when I was singing in the shower mum hid the camera and pretended I needed the toilet, then pressed the record button and started filming me”.
Child YouTubers?
Some children develop new aspirations that social networks turn into reality. Without waiting to be adults, they can live the future as children. They copy models of viral success and imitate aesthetics, styles, productions. In a quick scan through the transmedia adventure – the audiovisual story that continues in other media different from the main one – of the programme Máster Chef Junior broadcast by Spanish public television, it can be found that all the participants of the programme have Twitter accounts – despite the fact that many of them are under 13 years old – with the message that they are accounts “supervised by the parents” of the children.
Some of them reach 3,000 followers on Twitter, promote commercial products on their networks and copy basic models of the most popular media trends. Some of them even define themselves with the hashtag #MiniFashionBlogger.
The children of Master Chef Junior are taking advantage of this media bonanza. A few of them are now YouTubers and have 10,000 to 15,000 followers on their respective channels. One “mini YouTuber”, on her channel, says she will present some toys and in one of her videos, with more than 12,000 views, she talks about the six swimming costumes – of course, from different designers – that she has taken for her summer holidays.
Her Instagram accounts have almost 60,000 followers and observing the interaction they generate on some of the profiles, as can also be seen in the comments on her YouTube videos, allows us to appreciate the risks to which they expose themselves. Insults, mockery, requests for personal information, irony about their bodies, declarations of love, requests that are not at all in keeping with their ages, offensive language…
In theory, these accounts are, for the most part, supervised by parents.
Can anyone supervise the parents?
