The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up–and They’re Horrified | Hacker News Reader

The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up–and They’re Horrified

theatlantic.com

75 pointspaulpauper40 comments

When I'm not sure about something to do with my now-toddler, I ask myself: what would 15- and 30-year-old (insert kid's name here) want me to have done right now?

Make him wear his detested glasses so he doesn't develop a lazy eye? Yes!

Record and post him having a breakdown over not getting to play in the sink as long as he thinks he should have? No!

That sounds like a pretty foolproof way to approach it. In those specific examples, too, one is clearly for his benefit (unless he wants to grow up with a lazy eye...) and the other would solely be for yours.

Not that I think parents should or need to be faultless perfect martyrs with no needs of their own, but social media clout means nothing to a two-year-old and is 100% for parents' gratification.

The universe will always produce a better fool

In this case, these parents will tell themselves that they'll make their children famous/rich.

I mean, let's not throw the toddler (recording the freakout) out with the bathwater (posting it). They and family might enjoy the video as one of those "I was such an adorable little shit" kind of retrospective, privately of course.

I think this is almost enough, but the child might not want any pictures on the internet. What would you say about a regular picture showing his face? He might not want his face online at all.

I haven't posted any of him, and ask friends and family not to post any pictures with him in them, even if they're pretty sure their Facebook/Instagram/whatever settings would keep it from getting around. Once I think he's able to understand what the internet is and the ironic permanence of things you later wish would go away (and the fleeting nature of things you'd love to see again in a few years), he can start making his own choices.

However, I'm not going to judge parents who post normal, happy, non-embarrassing kid pictures sometimes. He might end up standing out as a bit of an oddball for not having any publicly-available pictures from his childhood.

In a world which has pageant moms, I don't see how this can surprise anyone, it's just a new expression of an old illness.

I think of all the childhood actors who struggled ever after with the fame that many of them never got to personally experience, but instead, inherited from their parents. For instance, the Nevermind baby. [0]

There are probably going to be a lot more Brittney Spears' in humanity's future.

[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-58327844

Also, Wil Wheatons

https://wilwheaton.net/2022/05/yes-i-was-forced-to-be-a-chil...

That Nevermind baby story paints a nuanced story. It doesn’t seem necessarily like a net negative for him. Much less than the people in OP article.

It makes me glad that France and several European countries already started to tackle this a while ago and are in the process of banning the practice altogether. Children, like everyone else have a right to privacy, and the parental duty as their guardians is to make sure that their privacy is protected, not undermined.

"On average, children have 1,300 photos of themselves circulating on social media platforms before the age of 13, before they are even allowed to have an account,"

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-france-law-a...

https://archive.ph/XISkS

Well, if you have idiotic parents who are either greedy, emotionally crippled or compensating something broken in their lives to stream their lives from A to Z, you are in a world of pain and this is one way it can manifest.

I have no understanding for such folks, it may be considered criminal in future or not, but its highly amoral anytime.

An acquaintance of mine started a small "mommy" blog when she had her first baby and it grew so fast she was getting sponsorship deals. She got another kid after that and another .. and 7 more. She has now 10 kids and makes many hundred thousand euros a year with sponsorship deals.

She even monetized her kids illnesses as one has ADD, another has autism and she made videos with them about going to doctors and even filming inside the offices and clinics.

Her oldest is now 14 and refuses to go on camera anymore and some of the smaller kids got teased and bullied in school.

She then started to monetize herself more, had her nose, chin, lips and boobs surgically altered.

Truly sad to see her develop in a way that seems unhealthy for her kids and her own psyche (as she's also increasingly mentioning burnout and depression)

That does seem to paint a relatively clear "child exploitation" picture.

Frankly I'm surprised it doesn't fall under child labor laws.

There are a ton of YouTube channels like that, where parents exploit their children for view and sponsorships. Its horrible

Yep, and kids love watching it

"She has now 10 kids"

You have to give her credit for going all in with her scheme, though...

If you had been raised by a society (and parents) that taught you that caring about privacy was elitist, and that you haven't really been somewhere or done something unless you have a selfie of you being there or doing it, you'd want to protect your children as much as you could from the predators that profited from you.

Every level of government and business is actively trying to break down or remove your boundaries through surveillance and recordkeeping, and to publicly mock you as some sort of stalinist luddite nazi spy for complaining about it.

I only talk about Sproutlet in mostly generic terms in public... on facebook when I do show photos, etc... it's to a limited distribution, and not the whole world

I think I've taken a reasonable approach to the management of the 10,000+ photos/videos, of which maybe 20? have made it into the world.

Its still getting shared with Facebook. Are you okay with having your child's photos being used for training facial recognition software? Is your child okay with it?

Facebook purged all their face recognition data a few years ago. It's not even an available feature now.

That’s huge and I hadn’t heard. Something actually deleted. (Assuming it is not a PR stunt.)

It was when privacy laws started forming and the EU was beginning to really push IIRC. I don't think it was PR, they probably saw they were painting a giant target on themselves as long as they kept that functionality.

It's unavoidable in US society these days. I'm sure that tagging has happened on photos from other children in classes, parties, etc.

Am I ok with it? I accept the things I cannot change.

Of course it’s not. Neither of my children’s faces have ever appeared on social media. It just requires a little discipline on the parents part, which seems to be in short supply these days.

You can’t discipline others at birthday parties, unless you want no one to show next year.

Maybe beg and plead, not sure.

I’d be willing to bet their photos have been taken at malls and sold to marketing agencies, and their future passport and drivers license photos will too

Being okay with things you cannot change and actively working to further those things are two very different concepts

You cannot change the fact that you're posting photos of your kids on facebook?

My sister engaged in casual oversharing of her son's early life on Facebook. Nothing too egregious, just lots of baby/toddler photos and cute widdle nicknames in the comments and stuff.

I told her, "You do realize that he's going to grow up to be a teenager, then an adult, and resent you for life because everybody he knows saw you call him your 'little bean', right?"

After that the cutesiness tapered off.

Geez, that's very harsh. My mom still calls me all kinds of pet names, but I don't resent her for it (anymore). I guess I did as a teenager, but teenagers are generally idiots. An adult who resents his parents for having pet names for him/her as a toddler has some other issues to work through I think.

The problem isn’t the pet names, it’s the oversharing on Facebook and YouTube

Unless something else is going on or the baby ends up mentally ill as an adult, it will not resent your sister for calling it 'little bean' in public and posting pictures of it Wadling about in diapers.

The baby might resent these things as a teenager, but who cares? Good luck organizing your own parenthood in a teenager-resentment-safe manner.

Are modern teenagers really looking up old Facebook posts from their peers’ moms to mock them for some nickname they had before they could speak? That seems like such a reach. If anything, that type of investigation would get the investigator labeled as a weirdo.

Highschool is cruel.

Looking forward to the first lawsuits over this stuff.

This is why the EU has a “right to be forgotten”, as does California now under CCPA/CPRA.

Good luck finding all the places and getting them to comply. I have filed a few of these and a number of US companies didn't bother to reply or didn't have a working US contact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com