Influential children: when the family is understood as a business
- The families that show the everyday inside the house on social networks and the children who play, make up or dance in the gigantic window of the Internet have already become a business that moves millions. More than one demands legislation that protects minors, arguing exploitation and fingerprint.
We have become accustomed to families selling their daily privacy on social media, as well as to children with toys from brands and video games from Tik Tok, Instagram, etc., who use costumes and makeup from specific brands, demonstrating this or other skill or having unnatural tertulias. In these times when youtubers, influencers and streamers have multiplied, the presence of children and the prominence of children attracts many visits, and that is known by brands and companies that want to sell their products.
How can 10-year-olds work as influencers? Cam Barrett is one of the biggest activists in the movement that demands cutting by law: childhood and adolescence have passed, and is now defending the rights of children influencers, to prevent minors from participating in audiovisual content in which economic benefit is involved. He talks about the fingerprint he didn't choose: when menstruation first came down, for example, it was recorded on video, visible to everyone.
The leading role of children attracts many visits and brands and companies that want to sell their products know that
Journalist Fortesa Latifi tells Cosmopolitan magazine. He is working on the book on the subject, and in the same article, another former influencers explained that as a child he suffered enormous pressure from his parents so that he could participate in the videos and try to smile and rejoice until he made the perfect video, “otherwise they told me that he was not an important family, to see if he wanted everyone from home to starve to death.” In the words of this 20-year-old woman, “Sometimes I didn’t know where the real reality started and the reality that was chosen for social networks ended; being an influencer child made us a mother and I more than a working mother, and once you crossed that border, when you transform the family into a company, it’s hard to step back.”
He suffered enormous pressure from his parents, “otherwise they told me that my family was not important, to see if I wanted everyone from the house to starve to death.”
In the crazy tour wheel and “like”, more than one case of exploitation has been announced, but parents who use children in the social media industry have told journalist Fortesa Latifi that this activity is a kind of game for their children, that they respect when and how children want to appear and that, in addition, part of the money they earn will be for them in the future, that they participate in a business that is open to them many doors. A significant example appears in the article: an influencer mother compared her two daughters in a video by Tik Toki, saying that a strange girl from school and another popular girl among her friends, and although the 'rare' sister was embarrassed by the video, they decided to keep the video and fix it at the top of her page because she has many visits. Her mother says she awarded them: she shared the money generated by the video between two daughters to fund the changes they want to make in her room.
