Published by: Sophia Izabelle Bandiola
Date Published: December 11, 2023
Time Published: 8:15 AM
In a world where opening Facebook, Youtube, or anything else, and seeing children exposing themselves to online danger for the sake of clout is a trend, today’s modern child labor is being glorified and bedazzled by the words “social media influencer”. A very simple word that literally defines someone who influences people in social media—a job in today’s era. However as children start to get actively involved, the distinction between ‘occupation’ and ‘exploitation’ starts to blur.
Uploading content centered around the child puts them at risk for sexual exploitation of internet weirdos and pedos. Here in the Philippines, Online Sexual Exploitation of Children (OSEC) is considered one of the country’s most committed crime acts [2]. This means that materials containing children are often target of sexual abuse with 8 out of 10 Filipino being at risk [3]. Photos and videos showing simple day-to-day activities of a kid such as bathing or eating fruits, would be nothing but a feast for degenerate people on the internet.
Sharing pictures, videos, and opinions has always been the concept of social media; a window of one’s self to the world through posts, shares, and likes. Parents are no exception to this. Be it to connect with other relatives, or just to share memories with the rest of the world, they all post it. This serves no issue until the sick realization that in the next 13 years of their children’s life, an average of 1,300 photos of them as a children—their first step, first walk, that time they ate chocolate, them in cute clothes, and them with none—will be seen by the rest of the world before they even understand how to ride a bike as found by Melissa Locker in 2018 [1]. These data can be freely used by literally anybody for myriads of reasons, all of which are exploitive to the right and privacy of the children themselves. By the time these kids are able to gain control of their online presence, the majority of their childhood would have already been commercialized, whether by their parents or by anyone else, and have their internet life perfectly curated to suit the taste of the viewers they did not even know about. It is like the Truman Show, except it is not a mere show, and certainly not a fiction.
The problem also lies with the fact that children are legally unable to give approval. This means that anything that is profited with no direct consent from them is nothing but a stolen and forced labor. When compared to ‘normal jobs’, social media influencing lacks the same amount of legal protection as the rest of occupations especially those laws that protect the younger ‘influencers’. There is currently no local ordinance that is specifically protecting social media influence from any sort of harm; just a hefty risk of possible abuse and exploitation in a legally-unsupervised job. These are the childhood of the children who are blindly dragged around to work for an entire day with no regard for their personal time, something that even most ‘adult jobs’ would consider abusive and inhumane.
Youth who could influence other youth would have been a slightly better concept if not for the exploitative and dangerous depth of the issue. If society wants to be in a world where children are protected from any kind of harm, it has to properly recognize the gravity of having naked children on Facebook or Youtube live. We, for once, have to realize the distinction of danger from entertainment and actually start creating a free space for the children—both in real life and on the internet. Addressing child exploitation on the internet is not a simple issue of overreacting to a post showing the kid’s face online. It is an appropriate response to witnessing an innocent life be traded for a fraction of clout and limelight.
REFERENCES:
[1] Locker, M. (2018, November 8). Parents post 13,000 images of their kids online by the time they’re 13. ๐๐ข๐ด๐ต ๐๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ข๐ฏ๐บ. https://www.fastcompany.com/.../parents-post-13000-images...
[2] Roche, S., Otarra, C., Fell, I., Torres, C.B., & Rees, S. (2023). Online sexual exploitation of children in the Philippines: A scoping review. ๐๐ฉ๐ช๐ญ๐ฅ๐ณ๐ฆ๐ฏ ๐ข๐ฏ๐ฅ ๐ ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ต๐ฉ ๐๐ฆ๐ณ๐ท๐ช๐ค๐ฆ ๐๐ฆ๐ท๐ช๐ฆ๐ธ. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2023.106861
[3] World Hope International. (2020, October 15). OSAEC: A modern face of human trafficking. https://worldhope.org/osec-a-modern-face-of-human.../
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