Recommendations to Combat Child Exploitation in Social Media

Abstract

The advent of social media has led child social media stars to garner millions of followers, viewers, and dollars, yet beneath the surface, these stars have been extremely vulnerable to exploitation. The legal landscape offers few financial, labor, and privacy protections for child content creators. Examples abound of parental content creators violating their children’s privacy and dignity for content. We propose five areas governments and institutions should focus on to address the exploitation of child social media stars. First, policy makers should create laws to ensure fair financial compensation of children in social media content. Second, policy makers should extend labor protections to child creators. Third, states, international institutions, and political actors should develop and enshrine a child’s right to be forgotten. This allows children, regardless of parental consent, to be removed from online content. Fourth, governments should implement third party monitors to monitor the protections of child creators. Finally, international treaties should be expanded to protect child creators. The UN Declaration of Human Rights should be amended to include a right to be forgotten, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals should expand to include a goal of child dignity in work.

Keywords: social media, human rights, child exploitation

JEL Classification: J13