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Media Fodder

Nice essay on the temptations and perils of monetizing children. It might have started benignly even, the desire to share pictures of what you love and adore most in the world - your brand new baby. Though all babies are largely alike and are blessed with the same infinite cuteness, to the mother theirs is totally unique and that is how nature intended it. But the likes, comments, shares and reposts trigger addictive dopamine hits until over-sharing about that child becomes routine. The consequences can be bad for those kids who are being turned into media fodder without their consent (which they would be too young to provide anyway). In that sense, these mothers are no better than those pushing their children into labor. The difference is that later may have no choice given the crushing grind of poverty but the former do.

 ‘When mothers put little girls at the centre of their feeds,’ Bailey of BSM Media tells me, ‘I get uncomfortable … because we will look at the followers and there is a slightly higher amount of male followers.’ As more and more children front brands, this is not the only blindspot. We are (rightly) outraged if a dress is assembled by an eight-year-old sweatshop worker in Bangladesh; but we don’t think twice if that same dress is marketed to us by an unpaid, unprotected eight-year-old in the US. Influencer kids are not being kept out of school. They don’t live in crushing poverty and are not going to lose a limb if a machine malfunctions. But that’s not to say that their exposure extracts no mental toll. Performing your childhood for an outside, unseen and adult global audience can mess you up – just ask Macaulay Culkin.

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