Tech Refactored

Ep 24 - "Sharenting" and the Online Lives of Parents, Presented by NGTC Student Fellows

June 24, 2021 Nebraska Governance and Technology Center
Tech Refactored
Ep 24 - "Sharenting" and the Online Lives of Parents, Presented by NGTC Student Fellows
Show Notes Transcript
Center Student Fellows Jasmine Alexander and DeAndre' Augustus welcome center executive director Elsbeth Magilton to talk about her experiences online as a parent, and professors Valerie Jones and Elana Zeide to discuss the world of sharing the lives of children online.

Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and has not been thoroughly reviewed for completeness or accuracy.

[00:00:00] Gus Herwitz: This is Tech Refactored. I'm your host, Gus Herwitz, the Menard Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center at the University of Nebraska. Over the past academic year, we have been working with our student fellows. A talented group of graduate and law students from across the University of Nebraska on a series of projects addressing the interaction of technology in society and the challenges that follow.

Two of these teams of students are showcasing the work by teaming up with us on Tech Refactor to produce an episode.

Today we welcome DeAndre' Augustus and Jasmine Alexander, who have been learning more about online privacy for children and more specifically about the idea of Charing. They will first welcome our executive director and the producer of this podcast, Als Beth Magilton, to learn more about her experience protecting her children's privacy.

Online will then be joined by Professor [00:01:00] Ilana, Anxiety and Valerie Jones to discuss these issues and get their expert takes. Thanks Gu. 

[00:01:05] DeAndre' Augustus: We're happy to be here. Really appreciated and excited about this project, me and Ja around. Take it from there. 

[00:01:11] Jasmine Alexander: Thanks, Gus. Being a parent, especially a new parent, is exhausting and could be isolating.

Routines are disrupted and often parents find themselves separated from sources of support and routine like working friends. It's also exhilarating. Many parents naturally want to share adorable moments with friends and family, and social media presents itself  as a perfect platform to do that. This has led to a phenomena commentators have dubbed Sharenting, by which they mean the oversharing of their children's private moments in a way that violates their children's privacy and autonomy.  

[00:01:50] DeAndre' Augustus: To discuss her experience navigating these concerns. We are drawn by Elsbeth Magilton. In addition to being the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center's Executive Director [00:02:00] Elsbeth also happens to be a parent. Elsbeth, have you had to wrestle with these questions of how or what to share about your children's lives online? 

[00:02:09] Elsbeth Magilton: First of all, thank you so much for having me here and, and you hit the nail on the head. I, of course, wanna share my children because I'm exceedingly proud of them. As a parent, it's hard not to feel like some of their awesome accomplishments aren't also kind of my awesome accomplishments.

Right? Of course, that's not actually true. But of course, the time and the, and the effort that we put into supporting and helping to nurture our children is a really big part of our lives as parents. Uh, I kind of think of it as like the equivalent of putting your art on the fridge when you were a kid to show off, right?

This Instagram post of my kid at the science fair is me putting my art up on the fridge to show. What I've done, but as I've been a parent longer, I started to really realize that that was about me and not about them. And I became very cautious of their privacy and decided that my [00:03:00] desire to brag about them wasn't as important as about them beginning to tell their own story as they grow up about who they are and developing that story.

Right? Who they are at nine is not gonna be who they are at 30, and they should have a right to develop that themselves. And so it was sort of a, it's a hard thing to decide. How and what to share about your children for so many different reasons.

[00:03:25] Elana Zeide: What led you to that approach? 

[00:03:28] Jasmine Alexander: Were you that hesitant about sharing details about your kids on social media from day one?

[00:03:34] Elsbeth Magilton: Not at all. In fact, I would dare to say that I was an over-sharer after they were born and being a new parent, especially with a newborn at home and in the situation that we were in. , we were still hunting for jobs out of professional school. It was just really isolating and really hard. And so sharing that part of my life, brought community and brought the good parts of my life out into the open and, and let me focus on them. [00:04:00] 

But it really came to the front for me when we were at the grocery store, and it was right after my daughter was born and my son, who was like two at the time, kind of got out in front of me and started to almost go around the corner of an aisle. Totally fine. I, I could still see him, but I, I couldn't necessarily see what was on the other side of the aisle.

And someone said, Hi, Max. And he stood and realized that there was a person who recognized him, knew him, knew his name, knew who he was. And it was a person that I, um, had gone to college with who was, you know, a friend but had never met him. And, Was this weird confluence of feelings where I thought, Oh, that's so cute that she recognized him from social media.

And then in the flip side of that coin is, my goodness, that's so creepy that she recognized him from social media and that, you know, maybe someone I went to high school with might not have been the great person I thought they were. And do I want them to be able to identify my kid, know their name?

Convince my children that they know me. Right? And that's, that's a really dark [00:05:00] assumption to jump to. So it's not just about safety, it's also about privacy. But it, that was sort of a triggering moment for me. Uh, I also realized that I was this parent. I was spending too much time recording and posting events.

Then I was engaging in the events with my children. And so if I told myself I'm gonna stop posting my kids on the internet, it also forced me to actually. Be at the event with my child instead of figuring out how to, you know, frame the shot the best for Instagram or for Facebook. To be clear, I'm off Facebook altogether.

I do still have a private Instagram account that is a pretty limited number of followers and people, uh, But, and I don't share their faces there. I will share pictures of them from behind or different events that we're at sometimes with their masks on. I'll still share photos in the age of Covid, but that is the only place I share any, and even that I, I think I probably need to kick that habit too.

[00:05:56] DeAndre' Augustus: When you think about other people, colleagues, and friends, do [00:06:00] you get the impression that this is something that they are actively thinking about? Do you feel like you've noticed an overall change in the way people are approaching these? 

[00:06:11] Elsbeth Magilton: Honestly no, which is sort of distressing to me. I certainly know a few other parents here and there who have different, varying levels of strict adherence to not posting ever, or sort of like I do, which is on the one social media account.

I do still have, I keep it locked and I won't share their faces directly. Uh, but I still sign the releases at their school or at their summer camps to be photographed and posted. Um, and, and so I think that there's really a spectrum of it, but I would honestly say that majority of my friends aren't thinking about this at all.

Uh, and it, and it's really not something that I think is a lot of people's radars. And it's been interesting, you know, I stopped sharing photos of them and left Facebook and left Twitter in a personal capacity about three years ago now. And a lot of my friends had never even thought about their children's privacy, um, [00:07:00] until I mentioned it.

And, you know, and I hadn't thought about it until it kind of was staring me in the . So I think it's a, it feels so natural and so gratifying to share with the world those pictures that I think a lot of people just don't think about the flip side of it and the negative potential outcome. 

[00:07:20] Jasmine Alexander: Thanks, Elsbeth. Now Gus will have some questions for our experts: Elana Zeide, assistant Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law, and Valerie Jones, Associate Professor of Advertising and Public Relations at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. 

[00:07:38] Gus Herwitz: Valerie, Elana, thank you both for joining us today. 

[00:07:41] Elana Zeide: Glad to be here. Thanks so much.

[00:07:44] Gus Herwitz: Valerie, do you think that there's value in parents turning to social media to find support in what can be–really to say the least, uh–at times a pretty overwhelming endeavor?

[00:07:54] Valerie Jones:  I think there definitely can be value in it. I was thinking about this topic and looking at my own social [00:08:00] media feed. And looking at some of my friends in particular who had some challenges or, or some challenges with, with children and, and health conditions.

And one had a baby with a really rare birth defect, and she posts pretty regularly because she's trying to educate people about this birth defect that affects less than a hundredth of a percent of babies. And I had no idea about it. Right. So that can. A positive thing. I think she receives a lot of support through that.

Another who has a daughter who's on the autism spectrum, and she's been posting lately as part of autism acceptance month, and that's been a larger kind of movement to help draw attention to those who are on the, on the autism spectrum. So it can be a useful form of social support and a sense of community and, and can potentially, Help improve wellbeing, but we also know that it can have, um, negative effects as well.[00:09:00] 

[00:09:00] Gus Herwitz: So I, I like there kind of two different dynamics there. You have both. You're connecting and you're getting information. You're learning from others, building a, a network, and also you're educating, you're informing others who might not ordinarily see things that are otherwise invisible, which. Can help promote acceptance and understanding and knowledge, which is really a, a great, uh, potential benefit.

Uh, aside from your average social, uh, media user, though, I, I wonder there's also this other thing going on at times, uh, and exercise in personal branding online, we hear commentators talking about building your personal brand. For listeners who might not be familiar with this concept, could you tell us a little bit about what people mean when they talk about building your brand?

[00:09:42] Valerie Jones: You know, a brand is a shortcut to an idea, and like it or not, I think a lot of us have this in mind when we share online, whether we're sharing about our kids or not. We're, we're using it as a form of self representation and trying to build this image of who we are and what we care about and what we stand [00:10:00] for.

You know, what we share online is part of that image, part of that brand. We're building for ourselves, what we wear, the car we drive. You know, we may not like to admit it about ourselves, but this is all help crafting this picture of, of what we want other people to see of us and what we wanna express about ourselves in terms of who we are in the world and who we are kind of as a brand.

And I think those words can sound icky to some people. , but in in my world, it's, it's pretty commonplace to talk about people as brands. We can certainly look at celebrities of, uh, as brands and celebrities that have used social media really powerfully to build their brand in a way that they wouldn't have been able to any other way.

But we also see just parents, I think, who are trying to build their own brand of being a little influential 

[00:10:47] Gus Herwitz: mom, for example. So I'm thinking about the first words of every episode of this podcast. This is Tech refactored, Gus Herwitz, the Menards Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center.

I think I just hit four branding [00:11:00] concepts right there in. Sentence and a half. Certainly branding is important. Yeah. Uh, in this, uh, area of sharing.  

[00:11:06] Elana Zeide: You just wanted to say that again, Gus.

[00:11:08] Gus Herwitz: It's a good exercise in branding right there. But in the context of Sharenting, can being a parent be part of your branding?

My brand is, I am Mr. Mom. 

[00:11:19] Valerie Jones: Has anyone ever heard of Chrissy, Tegan? I don't know. Being, being a parent I think is certainly a part of, of her brand. I don't think we had to be quite that famous. For being a parent to be part of our brand too. It's a part of our identity, right? It's part of how we spend our time and, and, and what's important in our lives.

So I, I think it certainly can be a part of, of that self-representation of how, um, Others see you in the world and how you represent yourself in 

[00:11:48] Gus Herwitz: the world. Yeah. And o obviously I'm setting you up for a, what's the downside, uh, to this, uh, uh, question there? There seems a difference when I'm communicating my brand to the world as I [00:12:00] like sports cars.

I host podcasts, I love technology. This is all stuff about me when I'm communicating. I am a parent, I'm. I am a person in relationship to other people and in particular minors who don't necessarily have agency as adults do, don't have control or understanding of how they're being used in this branding exercise.

What, what are some of the concerns that we might have here and thoughts on how we might want to navigate these trade offs? 

[00:12:28] Valerie Jones: Yeah. No concerns, Only good things. Social media is always used as a weapon for positivity. Positivity, goodness, and light in the world. No, there, there are some downsides. Um, uh, and I think Elaine's gonna talk about this, um, later on too.

But certainly, you know, any time we share any, any information online, it can be, uh, weaponized or manipulated. And when we're sharing images of kids online, that that. On the lighter hand with spectrum, you know, [00:13:00] come back to ha in an embarrassing way when they, uh, get married or when they go to college on the darker side of the spectrum.

Those images could be, you know, manipulated in some really negative ways. So it, we do need to be, and, and I, I. You know, social media, like everything else, is a tool that can be used positively or negatively, right? So you can use social media really in a positive way to. Connect and help create that sense of community or, or or negatively and be oversharing about your child and sharing things that maybe they wouldn't wanna have shared when they get to be an adult.

And I think a very basic rule for those who do share, choose to share stuff online about their kids is thinking about when they get to be of age, how would they feel about you sharing this about them? And while it's impossible to fully predict if y'all can fully predict what your kids will think and do good job for y'all, , [00:14:00] it's impossible to fully predict, but it's a good rule of thumb to certainly put yourselves in their 

[00:14:04] Gus Herwitz: shoes.

Yeah. So let's, uh, bring you into the conversation. Uh, Ilana, uh, you're our, uh, resident privacy expert. Most parents aren't out there trying to. Empires around commodifying and monetizing their children. They have social media identities as parents, and they are trying to incorporate something. They care a great deal about their children into their lives and share that, uh, with their friends and family and maybe, uh, uh, the public to some extent are, are there good ways and bad ways to incorporate, uh, your children into, uh, your online persona?

What sort of privacy concerns does Shing raise? For that matter, do children have a right to privacy of some sort in this context? 

[00:14:50] Elana Zeide: Okay, I'll try to handle all of those one by one. . So the first thing that comes to mind with privacy in children is often very old school. [00:15:00] It's the context of social relationships, and I think that's also what comes to children's minds when they think about privacy.

All of us of a certain age had parents who had a wall of photos of us with very embarrassing haircuts and. And now the entire world can see that. Or if not the entire world, most of the people who could access your parents' social media feed. And it's like that, but potentially available to everyone and student, Sorry.

Children who are old enough are often concerned about that. They don't wanna be embarrassed in front of their friends. The privacy issues are much more complex than that. So first of all, to highlight something, to go back something Valerie said, What rights do children have vis-a-vis their parents? What, what kind of privacy rights do they have?

Well, children of course, may not want to be exposed for smaller. Social reasons that parents may not consider particularly important early in life, [00:16:00] but the consequences of being exposed on social media and really of having any digital footprint that's readily available are significant as people move forward in their lives.

So calling back to something Valerie said, France now has legislation that allows children to sue their parents for posting pictures of them on social. It takes effect when they become adults. The children have the burden of proving, uh, that they didn't consent to the social media posting, but certainly when they can't speak or understand really what's going on around them.

So when they're very young children, that could certainly be taken as proof in and of itself of. No real capacity to consent at that point, and parents who violate that risk facing a significant fine and up to a year in prison. I feel that makes parents hopefully much more ca cautious about what they post online and do.

Consider children as humans of their own, who have their own reputational concerns [00:17:00] and that, and that those matter. Going to Gus's question about the reputational concerns. It's not just about social dynamics. There are anything you put online is capable of being scraped by some entity somewhere and using that information to make assumptions about you and assumptions based not on the things that parents usually think about when it comes to their kids.

Things that are fairly unpredictable to humans. So it may be whether you use two exclamation points or three exclamation points. If there's a correlation between people who do that, then the machine learning systems can infer that you are perhaps, High income, low income, that you have certain personality traits, or at least they allegedly can predict this, and if they're used for those purposes.

For consumer profiling, even for for loans, housing, these kind [00:18:00] of significant effects on on children as they move forward in life. Parents' concerns about what is visibil. On social media, most parents know that they should advise their children to take off embarrassing things on social media when it comes time to apply for colleges or jobs.

So take away that cup of you that looks like you're partying underage, right? Don't look like you're an irresponsible human, but those visible things often. children and parents say, Well, what college admissions officer is going to have the time to look through all of these photos or read all of my tweet?

That's no longer necessary. There are automated systems that can look at these and catch suspicious words and children. So, you know, rising senior seniors have been unaccepted to colleges because they have posted things that were seen as racist or inflammatory on [00:19:00] social media, so they can have significant consequences later in life and that include.

As Valerie was mentioning, things that parents may posting for their own purposes. So learning disabilities, it may not be something that someone wants their employer to know about them and everything. Internet is forever, even if you do erase it. Complicated in that way. 

[00:19:24] Gus Herwitz: So I've got so many questions that I could ask so many questions.

So little time. The constant dilemma. First I, Do you know, has there been any litigation either in France or uh, the United States or anywhere that you're aware of, where students, where children are taking their parents to court over disclosures like this? And I'll, I'll add to the question, what a terrible law that is in one particular.

It is I, I understand what it's trying to do. It makes perfect sense, but it's saying, Hey kids, you get to sue your parents or you need to, do, you need to sue your [00:20:00] parents? That seems like a terrible family dynamic for the law to be setting up. Shouldn't there be some other, or is there some other less confrontational, adversarial frame that we could try and understand this issue in?

[00:20:13] Elana Zeide: know that there have been cases brought in France covering. In America, we, as far as, uh, I'm aware, you know, privacy laws come up all the time. So yesterday someone might have introduced a, uh, a law about this, but in my knowledge there are no similar rules that allow Stu allow children to sue their parents later in life for their social media postings.

There isn't, and that's partly because in America we don't like to have causes of action where people can sue each other based on speech because of the First Amendment. So Europe also has something that's relevant to long lasting footprints, which is called the right to be Forgotten, which is a real misnomer.[00:21:00] 

It is actually. Sometimes called the right to be an eraser law, but it's really at this point, the right to be de-indexed that in certain circumstances, European courts will. Have search engines like Google take people out of search results, so that information is still available technically on the internet, but you can't access it if you're just, uh, Googling someone's name.

It's not necessarily going to surface or surface highly at that point. There are a few of these, however, eraser laws in the United States. There is one in California that does permit when people turn 18 for them to erase things that are posted online. But it's a very narrow law in order to escape, uh, First Amendment problems.

So it's things that people have posted themselves. I don't know of any, I'm not aware of any time it's been used for children or new adults to have [00:22:00] used it to things their parents have posted. And I'm not really sure how that would go, but it would be a very interesting test 

[00:22:05] Gus Herwitz: case. So I'm going to, uh, ask, uh, the next question for both Ilana and Valerie because it's juxtaposing, uh, uh, the discussions that you have both offered it, it seems parents just making stupid bad decisions.

Innocent in a prior time, perhaps I'm going to post this really embarrassing, uh, photo of my child having this incredibly traumatic experience and it's gonna go viral and affect my, my kids' life for forever. Okay? That's a a no-brainer. Perhaps don't. Intentionally embarrass your child virally. What about the more innocent uses?

And let, let's use the example of a, uh, uh, a learning disability. You as a parent are trying to understand how to help your child. So you go to online forums, you share information about your child. You don't have the child's name. But you have an easily [00:23:00] identifiable name and you need to disclose in order to have a productive discussion.

My child is between six and eight years old. We live in such and such a community. They're at the public school. My name is Joe Bababa, Ada. Obviously not real name, but easily identifiable name. You can probably pretty easily identify who that child is and you've just disclosed really sensitive information about them, but not for bad reasons.

You're trying to be a better parent. You're trying to get resources and help them. How should we, as a society and uh, the law think about accessing this sort of information that almost necessarily requires disclosing sensitive information about your. 

[00:23:41] Elana Zeide: I'll bring up two, Two considerations from that. One is the, so aside from ways that information might be misused or used in against someone, as, as I discussed and as Valerie discussed, what the more innocuous information may still impact children [00:24:00] because they're still developing, they're growing, and that's a concept that's really embedded in our, our legal system.

Seal juvenile records or expunge them all in certain circumstances so people are not held back by things in their past and that is really does come up in terms of these issues, even if it's relatively, yeah, as I said, innocuous. Children are eventually adults and therefore autonomous human beings, and they wanna be able to create themselves.

They won't be able to recreate themselves, and this limits their autonomy to do so in a way that's much more permanent and much more comprehensive than simply having, uh, minor things be public about them in a pre-internet. Consistent social media sharing world. I do think that eventually there may become more mechanisms, either legal or technological for people to be able to re limit the [00:25:00] visibility of things that have been posted about them.

I don't know quite how that, Valerie, that's part of one of the things I'm working on, but I do think it's. 

[00:25:10] Gus Herwitz: Yeah. Th th this almost seems turning to Valerie, like a, a preemptive crisis communications, uh, sort of exercise, uh, uh, thinking strategically about how to manage the information you don't want out there when as a parent you're disclosing it from, from that frame in your background.

How, do you have thoughts on how parents might to approach this or think about it? Generally 

[00:25:30] Valerie Jones: speaking? You know, this requires what we're kinda talk, what we're talking about in terms of consequences. Requires, uh, a longer term mindset, right? There's kind of immediate outcomes or effects and longer term outcomes of effects and effects.

And I think as humans, we're pretty bad about thinking about longer term outcomes and effects, and having that influence our shorter term decisions hosting on social media. Creates is a social [00:26:00] stimuli, like creates dopamine, right? Like there's a neurological chemical release, , right? Um, but when you get some sort of positive rewards online after posting, and so those sort of feedback mechanisms I think are being created.

So short term that feels like maybe a okay or good thing to do because. Maybe you're getting supports for you or your child with this learning disability. Maybe you're feeling a sense of community, more able to get through a shorter time period and not really thinking about the longer term effects. And I do think this is a communication challenge, right?

And just thinking about how. How do we educate people to, to think a little more critically about how this is shared, because it seems like a very, in, like, innocent, innocuous thing, especially to those of us who don't think about social media and, and privacy all the time. But to, [00:27:00] uh, Lana's point, it, it, it can certainly have some very negative and long 

[00:27:05] Gus Herwitz: term effects.

Hey, Yolana, did you want to, uh, jump in on there? 

[00:27:08] Elana Zeide: Yeah. One thing to note is that, Unfortunate. A lot of parents I know are very careful they don't mention their child's name. They use an initial and that is fantastic and important, and they also try not to have any photographs of their faces online and that that is something that does help, especially if it's a normal person who might see something casually or even the nightmare scenario goes up.

College admissions officer looking at someone's social media, but to also remember that technology is getting more and more sys sophisticated and can recognize more and more things. Not being tagged in a Facebook photo a few years ago meant that your face was not recognizable and identifiable. And a lot of parents I know did that so that their children wouldn't be seen by others and identified by the system.

But, uh, technology. [00:28:00] It is very easy to re-identify someone in many circumstances. So just be careful. Just be careful that you don't over rely on a sense of anonymity as a, as a protection. 

[00:28:12] Valerie Jones: And I have to say, so Alana mentioned to the idea of just including your child's initial instead of the full name, which is something I've totally done to the point where another friend.

Who doesn't have kids, but is about to ask, is that a thing that you're supposed to do? Is that like a social media rule is just including an initial and not the whole name? Like why do you do that? And I don't even know why I do that. I think it's probably a desperate attempt to try and be somewhat mindful or thoughtful, but it makes me think that much as I certainly joke with friends about how you know, you really should.

There's no license to have a kid, right? Pretty much. You can have a 

[00:28:50] Elana Zeide: kid if, if you want 

[00:28:52] Valerie Jones: to, which is kind of wild. A lot of people go through baby classes, right? Kind of how to prep for having a baby situation. Maybe they should just [00:29:00] wrap into that, some communication, privacy, how to use social media or think critically about social media with your adorable little soon to be child.

Just wrap that all into those baby prep. How to be a good parent classes. 

[00:29:14] Gus Herwitz: Yeah, from a a legal perspective, I, the, the huge challenge here is obviously you're talking about the rights of someone else who's a minor, who doesn't have the ability to consent or, uh, autonomy in the same way. Uh, and, and it's.

Curious to think about from a legal perspective, how do we allocate the burden and how do we allocate the rights? You can almost imagine we, we have in employment context, anti-discrimination laws. There are factors that you can't look at, You can't look at someone's, uh, uh, race or gender or a religious status and housing law.

You can't look at certain factors. We could imagine perhaps laws in the future that say for purposes of college admissions, you can't look at certain. Aspects of someone's past that you might find [00:30:00] online or, uh, employment decisions gets into a much more challenging area because they're not as protected or protected at all statuses or characteristics.

But it's a challenging set of issues when someone who might not be informed or educated, it's hard to know what to do, is making decisions that's going to affect someone. 5, 10, 15, 20 years, uh, in the future. Figuring out the right way for us as a society and legal system to allocate those burdens is challenging.

Ilana, Valerie, uh, from your perspectives and backgrounds on these issues, what questions have I not asked that I should have? Uh, please feel free to say none quick. 

[00:30:40] Elana Zeide: Quick note is that we are talking about this because we have parents who are really, who are revealing things about their children, who, again, are very young, cannot consent, and while we conceive of parents as having a guardianship position, in most cases, you don't have the same sense of perhaps tension [00:31:00] between the parent's interests and the child's best interests, and that that creates part of the.

But also just a reminder that a lot of the problems that we are discussing right now also apply to people over the age of 18. We also might not want people over the age of 18 who post things over the age of 18 or the people post about them over the age of 18 to run into the same problems. So I do think that thinking about children's privacy often is a way to help set up problems that are, uh, inherent in privacy for.

[00:31:35] Valerie Jones: That's a really interesting point about that, the conflict between. The interests of the parents and the interests of the child not usually being so, or they're, they're not usually being such a conflict. Like there might be here when some parents, you know, we know have seen this, but with certain YouTube stars and YouTube channels of parents posting pranks of their kids and that being [00:32:00] a poor choice legally as well.

But that's, that's an interesting point about kind of using your child or using another person. To boost your social capital, right, or increase your equity or boost your brand. 

[00:32:15] Gus Herwitz: So, Valerie, you mention, uh, cases of parents pranking their children online. And I know there's this one case where a, a family basically had developed a brand.

Uh, they were on YouTube, they were monetizing their channel, and they, uh, played pranks on their children. And some of them were quite mean spirited. Uh, Child Protective Services, uh, was called in and there were determinations that the children were being adversely affected psychologically as a result. Uh, I'm just curious your thoughts.

This obviously is inappropriate use of sharing information about your children online. How, how do we think about this? 

[00:32:53] Elana Zeide: Poorly, badly, , 

[00:32:56] Valerie Jones: this family had built up 750,000 [00:33:00] subscribers, 750,000 people were watching them play pranks, slapping at slapping their kids or yelling at them, telling they'll be put up for adoption, which is a little.

A little bit hard to fathom, right? that anybody thought that was a good idea or that anyone's following that. And so I think it's, it's horrible to think about the parents during that, the effects on the children, but also kind of a sad commentary on culture maybe that there are 750,000 people. Wanted to see that.

Right. And if you were kind of, because part of what we do with social media, right, is we, we look to our social networks, you know, we look for validation. And when people like things or follow things, that reinforces that behavior and we do more of it, whether that's on social media or face to face, Right.

The way people react to it enforces [00:34:00] our behavior too. I'm not, certainly not saying that the the fault lies with the followers. It, it's a little bit scary that that feedback me feedback mechanism, that that loop can be created, that they're being rewarded in some ways to, to post that content and that it was only stopped when some legal.

[00:34:20] Elana Zeide: I think it's a really striking exam, a really, a really striking example of the tension between, in that case, uh, the parents' interests to mon to gain social capital, which is increasingly financial capital by doing something that is not in their child's best interest. In this case, it was fairly obviously not in their child's best interest.

When it's more innocuous sharing, aga as we've been discussing, it may still not be in the child's best interest, but that's a really. Example of you're exploiting your children in that circumstance. And I do know that, that people are talking about it in that way more and more. [00:35:00] In the legal community and considering what they might, what, what might be appropriate responses to that.

[00:35:05] Gus Herwitz: And, uh, on the legal responses, uh, aspect, it's also worth highlighting the role of the platforms. Uh, we have a lot of discussion about content moderation and platforms sending, on YouTube, viewers down an increasing path of radicalization. And we, we talk about this in terms of political polarization and sending people into, uh, terrorism paths and such.

Um, I, I wonder the extent to which, uh, uh, topics such as, uh, child protection is part of the content moderation discussion. Uh, I, I honestly don't know. Despite spending a lot of time thinking and talking and writing about content moderation, uh, it could very well be a overlooked area. Um, uh, on the traditional mo- content moderation discussion, 

[00:35:49] Elana Zeide: most platforms are explicitly not intended for children 13 and under because they're commercial platforms and that's a violation of [00:36:00] Kapa. Parental consent can be part of that, but they're explicitly not, are, are not supposed to orient themselves towards children of that age. And this is becoming increasingly complicated because platforms like Facebook are now coming out with their own social media for kids section.

Right now there's a huge discussion about Instagram for kids. And you know, my guess is that in certain circumstances you could certainly have parents directing the show even as been explicitly or officially a child's account, and you would run to many of the same problems. 

[00:36:41] Valerie Jones: My students always tell me that they just lied about their ages so that they could get onto Instagram sooner.

[00:36:45] Elana Zeide: Exactly. Standard response.

[00:36:46] Gus Herwitz: Well, we are, uh, unfortunately coming up, uh, on our time there. There's so much here. Jasmine and Deandre, thank you both for the work in developing this topic and this discussion. Valerie [00:37:00] and Elana, thank you for joining us. We will, Valerie and Elana. I, I just want to, uh, ask are there any particular resources, articles, authors, writers, thinkers, anything in this area that interested listeners, uh, you would direct to?

[00:37:14] Elana Zeide: I- I got a lot. But anyway, yes, definitely one of which is Anya Kamenetz who ha- wrote a great op-ed, uh, for the New York Times as NPR reporter who writes books about parents and children's relationship to technology, she's a fantastic. Natasha Singer at the Times, this excellent reporting on, uh, child privacy. Leah Plunkett created a, uh, wrote a book that was called "Sharenting". So she has that behind her. And in terms of the broader idea of the right to be forgotten, Meg Jones, Jeff Oslos, Amy Gajda, Robert Post it's, it's, You can go down the rabbit hole, but these are all excellent people if you're going to do that with. 

[00:37:57] Gus Herwitz: And what a rabbit [00:38:00] hole it is to go down. Hopefully it will help us figure out how to get some information down the memory hole.

Thank you, uh, for, uh, joining us. Everyone. Thank you again. Uh, Jasmine and DeAndre' and listeners, thank you for joining us on this episode of Tech Refactored and I've been your host, Gus Hurwitz. If you want to learn more about what we're doing here at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, you can go to our website at ngtc.unl.edu, or you can follow us on Twitter at UNL _NGTC.

This podcast is part of the Menard Governance and Technology Programming Series, hosted by the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, the Nebraska Governance and Technology Centers of Partnership, led by the Nebraska College of Law in collaboration with the Colleges of Engineering Business and journalism, Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska.

Colin McCarthy produced and recorded our theme music. Casey Richter provided technical assistance and advice. Elsbeth Magilton is our executive producer and Lysandra Marquez is our associate producer. Neil Rutledge helped to design and [00:39:00] conceive this episode. Jasmine Alexander and DeAndre' Augustus helped uh, write and research this episode.

Until next time, see you on insta.