Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned in Brief. I’m Preet Bharara. If you’re on social media, you’ve likely seen parents posting content featuring their children. When these parents amass thousands of followers, there’s potential to profit from these posts that primarily feature their kids. A new law in Illinois, which passed over the summer, seeks to address this relatively new issue of parents who monetize their children’s presence on social media. It allows those children upon turning 18 to sue their parents if they weren’t adequately compensated. The law is the first of its kind in the US and could pave the way for similar legislation in other states. Joining me to discuss this new law and its implications is Jessica Maddox. She’s a professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama where she studies social media and its societal impact. Professor Maddox, welcome to the show.

Jessica Maddox:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So can we begin with a basic question? What are we even talking about? There’s this thing called kidfluencing. What is that, and why are we talking about this?

Jessica Maddox:

Yeah. So as social media grew in popularity, people in a variety of ways started to realize they can be compensated for this, whether it’s through the platforms themselves through things like YouTube’s Partner Program or the TikTok Creator Fund. But oftentimes, more lucratively, through sponsored content, through brand deals, through corporations and companies reaching out to social media users and saying, “Hey, use this product in our post, and we’ll pay you X amount of thousands of dollars,” because they are typically in the thousands of dollars.

This extended to parents and their children. So kidfluencers or kid influencers have been a huge part of the social media landscape. They’re extremely popular on platforms like YouTube and TikTok where we also see family vlogging. So video blogging channels where parents use their children for content, and this can be useful for kids to learn a lot about how social media works, but as the law in Illinois set, the necessity of the law in Illinois shows there can be a lot of complications as well.

Preet Bharara:

When you say thousands, are there some parents, by using their kids on social media, making hundreds of thousands or more?

Jessica Maddox:

Oh, absolutely. I’ve talked to probably close to a hundred if not over a hundred influencers and content creators in my research career, and most of them will tell you… We’re not talking about a steady stream of income. Brand deals come as they are, right? You can never know when the next one is coming, but some of the creators I’ve talked to have told me they get paid $8,000 to $15,000 per post. That, of course, is on the higher end, but the lower end is not anything to scoff at. It can be $500 to $5,000.

Preet Bharara:

What kinds of brand deals are we talking about?

Jessica Maddox:

Yeah. So, I mean, it can be for anything. So, currently, I’m working on a project on book influencers. So this involves, of course, publishing companies reaching out to partner with creators to promote upcoming releases. But for parents and kids, it can be products. It can be school supplies. That’s the time of the year where we see a ton of school supply sponsored content on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube because kids need backpacks, kids need binders and pens, and I guess they get Chromebooks now, too. I don’t know, but all kinds of products. It can be nursery products for infants. All kinds of things.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So this law passed in Illinois, as I understand, it’s based off a law relating to child actors that was passed in 1936 in California, Jackie Coogan’s law. Explain who Jackie Coogan was and what that law was about.

Jessica Maddox:

Yeah. So Jackie Coogan is largely considered to be America’s first child actor is how he’s remembered in history. He got really famous in a Charlie Chaplin movie, I believe it was called The Kid, and earned the modern equivalent of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his child acting career. When he turned 18, he realized his mother and his stepfather had spent almost all of it so that he actually had no money and was essentially destitute and broke despite working his entire life.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Jessica Maddox:

So he sued his parents, and I believe, unfortunately, in his lifetime, he did not see it or really get any compensation back, but the law was passed then to protect others from having the same impact. So when we started talking about… Before the Illinois law was even passed, people were talking about, “Well, are these kids’ financial assets being protected for being in their parents’ content?” The Coogan Act was brought up a lot by saying, “Well, there’s laws to protect child actors, singers, models, whatever talent. Where’s the law…” and this is a piece I wrote a year and a half ago now, “Where is the law to protect these children and their financial assets?” because we often don’t think of what they’re doing as work, but it’s work. It takes time and effort to make content for social media, and I think that’s part of the problem and the confusion about this law is people are confused about what the labor of making content for social media actually entails, but that is why this law was so important because it is work, and these children are working, and they need to have their financial assets protected.

Preet Bharara:

So the California law was directed specifically at actors because I would imagine you could have a broad law in the child labor category that would just deal with all of it, and as new technology emerges, it would’ve covered social media, et cetera, but that was not the case, I guess.

Jessica Maddox:

Correct. It is my understanding that there is no federal equivalent of the Coogan Law. It’s just enacted, I believe, in a handful of states. Even existing federal child labor laws in the United States don’t account for social media, which is a larger issue that I won’t get into now of just how far behind social media laws and regulations are in the United States for keeping up with actual considerations of it.

Preet Bharara:

Is Illinois a hotbed of kidfluencing? Why would this pass in Illinois first among the 50 states rather than someplace like California or New York?

Jessica Maddox:

So that’s a great question and-

Preet Bharara:

No offense to Illinois, by the way.

Jessica Maddox:

Right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We love Illinois. I got family there. The law in Illinois really has to be credited to Shreya Nallamothu from Normal, Illinois who began looking into this as a school project and approached her congressman. To the congressman’s credit, they took it seriously, and the law began being examined, and analyzed, and taken form from their school project. So they truly deserve the credit, and really, that’s the reason is that there was just a congressman willing to listen and take this down, see it down the field to become legislation. I can say I probably can’t reveal the state names, but since Illinois’ law has passed, I’ve been contacted by two state legislatures in different states to talk about this law and the potential to get it going in their states.

Preet Bharara:

So you think there’s a likelihood that this will pass in other states as well?

Jessica Maddox:

I believe so. Yes, and I hope so. So I believe this should just be the beginning of the conversation. I don’t think it should remotely be the end. I definitely think we’re going to see other states work on this legislation, and of course, some will pass it, some won’t for whatever reasons, but I truly believe this is only the beginning of the conversation.

Preet Bharara:

So the law in Illinois that we’ve been talking about, what does it specifically require parents to do with respect to money?

Jessica Maddox:

Yeah. Essentially, it just requires that when kids are featured in their parents’ social media content, and there is any income that is earned from that content, be brand deals or from those social media platforms like partner programs or creator funds that I mentioned, that some of the money is put aside in a trust for the child, so that essentially when they turn 18, they will have access to this money because it’s understandable. As a minor, parents are in control of your finances, but this law seeks to protect that. In other words, it also provides the avenue for recourse that if the parent does not do it, under Illinois law, the child is completely in the right to sue them once they turn 18.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think there’s going to be a problem with enforcement, or is that a concern?

Jessica Maddox:

This is always the tricky part, right? It becomes the question of how.

Preet Bharara:

Don’t I know it?

Jessica Maddox:

Oh, yeah. Right. I’m preaching to the choir here. How do you prove it for starters will be difficult, and I think the more we see of these laws, the more it is actually going to require social media platforms to work with these state legislators to protect minors in this way. We obviously have very important conversations about how to protect minors on social media from a variety of harmful content, and we absolutely should keep having those conversations, but this is another aspect to it. This is child exploitation that I think social media platforms need to play a part of as well, and I always say if they can build a metaverse, they can figure out how to enforce this. They just have to choose to want to.

Preet Bharara:

I guess the other implications here. We’ve been talking about, I guess, the hypothetical situation in which the child is willing participant, and the parents are being somewhat responsible, and there’s this law to protect financially the child, but children are children, and depending on their age, they are more or less able to consent.

Jessica Maddox:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

What are the issues surrounding kidfluencing, which I’ll continue to call it because I like that phrase that I use, with respect to understanding whether or not the child is consenting to having his or her information online?

Jessica Maddox:

That’s the big issue is that social media are so large, and the potential for an audience is so great that even if a child is consenting, I don’t think they have… and I’m not a child psychologist by any means, but potentially, they might not realize just how many people might see this content, and that, of course, is going to be dependent on an individual child. Some children may have more of an ability to grasp that than others, but I say this because even coming into my college level social media and society class that I teach, my college undergrads are shocked when they start to realize how the internet is forever as we say, and just how much things stick around, and just how large audiences can be. So I think that’s one of the issues as well is that you never know who’s going to be on the other side of a screen consuming content, and while we can’t necessarily control for that, I think we can mitigate it a little bit by making sure children understand and that while it may be fun to be in mom or dad’s video, there are some greater implications to living your entire life on the internet.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, with respect to some of these, I’m not so familiar, are there children who are able to earn income based on their parents putting their images on social media before they’re even able to speak as toddlers?

Jessica Maddox:

Oh, absolutely. This even starts-

Preet Bharara:

How does that consent work if it’s a toddler?

Jessica Maddox:

Right. Well, that’s a great question, and as not a legal expert, I’ll defer to y’all on that one. But in terms of the ethical social media part that I think about frequently in my work and I can probably answer is it’s questionable, right? If your child truly is not able to even speak to comprehend their image being on social media, it might be worth a pause. Of course, there’s a fine line here. Right? An average person can decide whether or not they want to post a picture of their child, but when the monetization angle enters it, it becomes a whole other thing. So influencers in general have figured out how to extend their career trajectory by being a fun travel influencer or lifestyle influencer in their 20s, and then they sometimes segue to getting pets, and then they become pet influencers. Then, they get engaged, and they become wedding influencers. Then, they get pregnant, and they become pregnancy and maternal influencers. Then, they have kids, and now we have parents of kid influencers.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I guess what we’re talking about is not completely new in the context of there are babies in movies, there are babies who are in ads and are models.

Jessica Maddox:

Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Preet Bharara:

The consent issue arises there as well, and I guess the key point is in this context is how is the monetization being protected in the benefit of the child?

Jessica Maddox:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have advice for parents whether they should monetize, they shouldn’t monetize? Do you have a normative view on any of this?

Jessica Maddox:

Yeah, and I always feel like it’s important to say here that I’m not a parent. I don’t have kids. Sometimes the thought of raising kids in this completely social media world scares me, even though I do this for a living. Maybe it’s because I think about it so much, but I would give the same advice to parents that I give to my social media and society undergraduates. It’s just think before you post, and that just because you can do something on social media doesn’t mean you should do something on social media is generally my large scale social media advice, and that think about it’s not just you, and the immediate attention, and clicks, and likes, and views can be really appealing, but what are the lasting consequences of that?

When I say that, I think about… One of the reasons I started thinking about this so much is I started seeing a lot of disabled creators on the internet talk about how their parents had made content about them and their chronic illnesses and conditions their entire lives. Now that they were adults, they were like, “Wait, I didn’t want my entire life on the internet. I didn’t want all these personal details about my chronic condition being out there.” So I think it’s important to remember that yes, it’s maybe something you’re dealing with, but it is also something your child is dealing with as well, even if they aren’t disabled or have a chronic condition.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. My circumstances are a little bit peculiar because my kids were very young when I was a US attorney, and for safety and security purposes, I think to this day I have never posted a contemporaneous picture of any of my children’s.

Jessica Maddox:

Oh, wow.

Preet Bharara:

They have a little bit of a footprint, but I kind of… By virtue of the accident of the particular sensitive job I had, our kids were just not on it, so I didn’t have to worry about that so much. So I guess if you want that, everyone should try to become a law enforcement officer.

Jessica Maddox:

There you go. There’s the solution.

Preet Bharara:

What’s next in terms of the Coogan Act being updated or this kidfluencing financial bill? Anything else that we should be looking for on the horizon?

Jessica Maddox:

Yeah. I think we are going to see a lot more of this legislation attempted. In terms of the states I know, Washington State I think has carried this law the furthest down the field in terms of it maybe being enacted, and I do have to credit the young advocate group. Quit Clicking Kids has been essential in pushing and spearheading that legislation in Washington State. I think we’re going to see more of this. We’re going to see a lot of conversations, and I think with these laws emerging in states, we’re going to see a lot of conversations about, “Well, maybe why do we need this? Is this really labor? Is it work?” I would say yes, it is. I was just talking to a creator for research the other day who told me on top of their nine-to-five day job, they spend about 20 to 30 hours a week making content, editing videos, scheduling, monitoring analytics, doing all of this work. Of course, a child may not necessarily be doing that, but it goes to show that content creation, influencing, despite our stereotypical ideas about them, is labor, and our laws need to catch up to that.

Preet Bharara:

Professor Jessica Maddox, thanks so much for your time and for explaining this issue.

Jessica Maddox:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the CAFE Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former US Attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me, @PreetBharara, with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned in Brief is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producer is Matthew Billy. The audio producer is Nat Weiner. The editorial producers are David Kurlander, Noa Azulai, and Jake Kaplan. The production coordinator is Claudia Hernández, and the email marketing manager is Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.