The Dark Side of Child Influencers: Exploitation and the Limits of Regulation

With a swift search on Instagram or Tiktok it is indeed easy to find children and adolescents turned into influencers. Some show their routine, and many participate in trends dancing. In several profiles with an average of more than 100,000 video visualizations, it is indeed observed that they generate almost daily content and that many have agencies that represent them. In most, it is indicated that they are managed by their parents. These minors, however, often receive public messages of more or less explicitly sexual content, which are not erased by the administrators of their virtual profiles. It happens that the deletion of comments reduces the visibility of the post. The Organic Law for the Protection of Minors in digital environments presented by the Government has come forward this week in Congress after overcoming the Vox veto. But the proposal does not even take into consideration in which children are not passive users of the networks, but also content creators. Experts warn that, in their search for likes and visualizations, minors can be led to reproduce sexualized behaviors that do not correspond to their age.

The practice can start innocently: the minor, or his parents, open a public profile. But not everything they share will have a grate reach. certain videos, however, manage to break the nearby bubble and viralize, giving more visibility to the profile and attracting more followers. The engineer and former director of Meta Arturo Béjar explains, in a phone call from California, what kind of content is usually viral: “On Instagram the algorithm is designed so that, if a boy – and especially a girl – uploads a video dancing, that content can have a hundred times more visualizations. If you possess with insinuating gestures, even more.” Little by little, the minor understands what type of attitude should adopt to attract more interaction. Béjar denounced before the US Congress in 2023 that the company does not take measures to protect the youngest.

In some videos, girls are seen as adults, they dress in minishorts And they take their finger to their mouth while they dance, but it is in the comments were the most disturbing is: men who praise their body, ask that they publish more times, ask their age and tell him that they have written to him privately. The rule of the networks is clear: the more interaction – it does not matter what kind – the more reach. With more visibility, the profile begins to grow and generate income. the doctor in Clinical Psychology Silvia Álava, author of the book Have happy childrenwarns that many minors are not aware of the risks of what they share or the use that can be made of their videos.

The government’s proposal for the protection of minors on the Internet seeks to overcome this inaction of platforms. It provides for the implementation of an age verification tool and elevates from 14 to 16 the minimum age to consent to the use of personal data in the networks. But, according to the Ministry of Youth and Childhood, it concentrates on limiting “the most general access to the set of accounts on different social media platforms”, without specifically dealing with the monetized use by minors. Childhood defends that children and adolescents creators of content represent a “complex and specific phenomenon”,and ensures that “work is being done to address it more concretely in the future.”

Sheila and Hernán are parents of a 13-year-old digital content creator. They explain that the idea of ​​recording videos was bo

Publication Date: 2025/09/13 10:15:34