New law 'protecting child influencers' is bad and dangerous

I investigated what the law actually says and spoke to top free speech and legal experts about how it could be used. What I found is not what the media is reporting.

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It took me weeks of reporting to put together this deep dive and to speak to nearly a dozen actual free speech and legal experts about this law, something not a single mainstream media journalist did.

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Recently, Utah became the latest state to pass a major law claiming to "protect child influencers." HB 322, was signed into law by Governor Spencer Cox on March 25th and was celebrated across the internet and with breathless coverage in the media.

But according to experts, the law may not actually protect child influencers and could lead to widespread censorship of journalistic content on social media.

For those who aren't deep into the tech policy world, I can understand why you wouldn't immediately realize there might be problems with this law and others like it. The media coverage of all these "child influencer laws" has been atrocious. Many reporters covering these stories are not only ignorant of how the influencer business works, they're also uneducated about the broader political efforts to dismantle free speech protections in America.

Before we get into the history and motivations behind the coordinated legal efforts in states like Utah to dismantle free speech protections, I want to break down some of the most basic problems with this law as it applies to child influencers.

I've reported on these child "influencer" legal efforts since the beginning for outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post. For this piece I spoke to nearly a dozen top tech policy experts, some of the best free speech lawyers in the country, well known child safety advocates with decades of experience, along with managers who actually work in the child influencer space.

This detailed analysis of Utah’s law took weeks of work. I can only do this sort of accountability-focused reporting with your financial support. Please consider purchasing a yearly subscription to User Mag today.

Key problems with the law

If you read the mainstream media coverage or listen to most people on TikTok and YouTube, you'll hear them explain the law this way: They'll say that it mandates that parents who make more than $150,000 a year by producing content featuring their children, will be forced to set aside 15% of their earnings into a trust that the kid can access when they turn 18. Once a child turns 18, the minor can also petition a court to require that a content creator be forced to delete or edit any social media content that they were featured in as a minor.

However, nowhere in this law does it specify that these new regulations only apply to mommy vloggers, family influencers, or even just parents. Nowhere. News articles, TikToks, and YouTube videos claiming this literally just made up that detail whole cloth.

In fact, the law is written incredibly broadly. It doesn't just apply to parents, it applies to ALL content creators in the state, and it defines a content creator as any "individual who produces social media content." This means that this law is not just regulating family vloggers, it's regulating masses of social media content creators including journalists, activists, and teenagers themselves who are making and monetizing their own content.

While the law states that a creator does have to make at least $150,000 to trigger trust and compensation requirements, this threshold doesn't actually narrow things much at all. As anyone who works in the content creator industry knows, incomes can fluctuate wildly year by year. Many content creators, especially if they're growing, don't even know what they'll make the next year.

Say a TikToker made $60k last year through a patchwork of platform monetization offerings. The next year, they have some viral success. They better start keeping meticulous records and complying with this law preemptively, because if they happen to hit that $150,000 threshold, they will be liable.

This monetary threshold also leaves other critical problems unresolved. For instance, because of the broad way "content creator" is defined in the law, these regulations could apply to news reporters or investigative journalists covering high-profile issues regularly involving minors. For example, protests, crime reporting, high profile court cases involving minors and so on.

The law could restrict documentary producers and commentary channels who monetize through platforms like Patreon or YouTube. If you try to make a documentary that covers a story involving youth exploitation or social movements involving minors and it ends up on YouTube, you could find yourself in major legal hot water.

A huge reason we even know about the wrongdoing in the family vlogging world is thanks to tea channels and accountability-focused creators. The way this law is written, they're subject to these regulations too.

Removes child influencers' agency

The law also treats all children with an online presence if they're exploited. As the journalist Jo Piazza told me, "The law acts as though every child who's online is a victim, which is a completely wrong and dangerous approach to legislation." There are so many kids who are making a livelihood by their own choice on these platforms, and this law completely strips away their agency.

The law fails to even consider that the vast majority of content creators are not family vloggers. And it ignores the fact that the vast, vast, vast majority of content featuring children online is content that children themselves put online.

The profession of influencer remains the number one career aspiration for young people, and kids can sign up for social media and begin monetizing their online presence as teens with parental consent. In fact, some of the most successful social media stars today did just that.

Take the Hype House, for example, a TikTok collab house that launched back in 2019. The collaborative nature of the group of young stars, including Charli D'Amelio who was just 15 at the time, skyrocketed them to fame. Under this Utah law, however, such collaborations could not exist.

The vast majority of content featuring children online is content that children themselves put online. (Getty images)

Say a 15 year old Charli wanted to establish the Hype House in Salt Lake City. She and her teenage friends all get together and start creating content, of course with parental approval. But the money rolls in, but before they know it, they've broken the law.

A content creator under the law is defined as an individual who produces social media content. But the law also stipulates that a minor who is the sole producer of a minor's own social media content is somehow not a content creator. Even crazier still, the stipulation around who qualifies as a minor vs a content creator does not exempt a minor who is producing content of themselves and another minor (say a sibling or friend). Or, teens who film themselves doing group tiktok dances.

Basically, the law doesn't take into consideration the fact that teenage influencers run their own channels and frequently collaborate with each other. "Whoever owns the [social media] account is responsible for all other performing minors, regardless of if the account owner themselves is a minor," said Jess Miers, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at University of Akron.

In this Hype House example, who is the qualifying minor who is entitled to the 15% cut of the revenue and a trust in their name? Are each of Charli's teenage friends qualifying minors? Is it Charli herself, who's only 15, a qualifying minor? If so, then who, under the law, is the content creator? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the tedious records, mandated by the law, are being kept, documenting exactly how many minutes each minor appears on screen across myriad platforms to ensure everyone is compliant.

The law doesn't answer these questions. Alix Negrin, a talent manager who works with minors, told me that the law's confusing requirements will simply discourage organic collaboration between any underage creators. This puts many young creators at a disadvantage. Cross collaboration has led to some of the most successful groups on YouTube and TikTok, many of which were founded by or included minors.

It's important to note that this law is not about making social media safer for kids of family influencers. The way it's written, it appears to be about taking away young people's ability to build their own platforms and have a voice online.

At one point the law mentions performers, but it's written so sloppily that it doesn't even specify that performers must be children. "If you look at the law's definition of a performer, it's not limited to minors," said Tyler T. Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law's High Tech Law Institute. "If you read this law literally, any performer who makes more than $20,000 needs to have their parent notified. I'm skeptical of a law that's so badly drafted that they didn't include the most important thing in their definition of who a performer is."

Influencer remains a top career aspiration for young people (Getty images)

The next issue with the law is that it gives undue rights to parents of minors. For instance, say two teenage brothers start a YouTube channel together with the help of their parents. They run most of it, but the parents are in full support. The business grows and the boys are 16 and 17 years old. Are they content creators or qualifying minors? If they're minors, which it seems they would be given their age, does this law now entitle their parents to up to 85% of their revenue? Legal scholars I spoke to said that it might.

Jess Miers, said that a major result of this law will be to discourage teenagers' ability to pursue their own careers as content creators. "It's kind of saying, look, we're cutting off that revenue stream, or saying you don't get to be online until you turn 18. Which is in line with what we've seen from previous bills where the idea is to make sure that if you're under the age of 18 you don't get to have full access to the internet. Here, if you're under 18, you don't really get to have access to an incredibly lucrative revenue stream for legitimate uses."

Which brings us to another problem with the law. It doesn't make any distinction between minors. It treats a 17 year old exactly the same as a three year old, ignoring the fact that one has agency over establishing their own online presence and one does not.

The pretense for passing this entire law was that it would help protect kids from these allegedly abusive parents. Headlines tied the law to the case of Ruby Franke. Ruby is a mother who ran a family vlog channel called "8 passengers" for several years and abused her children. In December 2023, she plead guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse. The court sentenced her four consecutive terms of one to fifteen years in prison.

It's an awful case, but it's notable that there were no influencer-related laws on the books needed to prosecute and convict Ruby. Despite that, media coverage has claimed that this law will prevent similar cases of child abuse. How?

Under the Utah law, parenting content creators are explicitly allowed to be trustees for their children's trusts. This gives these allegedly abusive parents even more control over their child’s finances. In cases like Ruby Franke, where parents are already exploitative or abusive, this law unintentionally empowers them financially.

“This law is like the fox is guarding the hen house," said Maureen Flatley, a child exploitation and safety expert, who has advised on child safety legislation, advocacy efforts, and tech laws since 1994. "Ruby Franke was abusing her kids, so why would you have the abuser be the trustee of anything?”

It's completely counter intuitive. Here you have a kid who was a victim of an incredibly abusive and unscrupulous person, but this law effectively asks the abuser to maintain all these detailed records and to protect their child's money. This could worsen situations of exploitation.

"This bill is not going to solve a problem, and it may even lead to more exploitation. This is what we've seen all over the place with these kids and social media bills," Flatley said. "They're almost unfailingly written by people who have an axe to grind or are interested in virtue signaling and not what would actually be effective."

Doesn't regulate family vloggers primary forms of income

Aside from being problematic in all of the ways discussed, the law is also varying levels of ineffective. It misunderstands the actual business model of influencers to the extent that it doesn't even regulate or entitle kids to a portion of most family vloggers' primary forms of income.

Influencers make money in myriad ways, but family and parenting influencers specifically often generate much of their income through affiliate revenue. This means selling products through sites like Amazon, where they're able to garner a portion of revenue for all sales generated. When a family vlogger is big enough, they may also have long term brand partnerships which aren't tied to specific pieces of content. Neither of these major sources of revenue are even acknowledged by this law.

Brendan Gahan, a marketer who's worked in the influencer world for over 15 years told me that this oversight is so egregious that, even if all other aspects of the law were functional, which they're not, it renders the law practically ineffective when it comes to monetarily compensating a child.

Instead, the law solely regulates income generated directly from social media. It stipulates that content creators must perform a complex calculation to deduce what percentage of their earnings they must distribute into a trust for a qualifying minor who appears in their content. The formula that the government came up with here is so absurd I can only assume it was written by Chat GPT:

E = (A/T) * (Q/S) * (M/2) or the formula E =

(i)E = a qualifying minor's earnings;

(ii)A = all paid minutes featuring any qualifying minor;

(iii)T = total paid minutes;

(iv)Q = paid minutes featuring the qualifying minor;

(v)S = the sum of paid minutes for all qualifying minors;

(vi)M = the preceding month's income from social media; and

(vii)X = the total number of qualifying minors; and (b)(i)subject to Subsection (5)(b)(ii), transfer the minor's earnings described in Subsection (5)(a)(i) directly to the qualifying minor; or (ii)after the qualifying minor's parent or guardian establishes a trust as described in Subsection (3)(c), transfer the qualifying minor's earnings calculated to each qualifying minor's trust.

You may notice that, as if these calculations weren't burdensome enough, under this law, content creators must maintain meticulous records of any minors that appear in their content. They must catalog exactly how many minutes or seconds those minors appear on screen. This is in order to track the moment that each minor becomes a "qualifying minor".

A minor becomes a "qualifying minor" if they are featured in about 30% or more of a creator's content during a specific time period. Once that happens, the creator must establish a trust for that child (a child they may not even know) and distribute a percentage of their earnings into that trust. The content creator also must contact the parents of minors featured in their content. Again, these could be abusive parents.

A chilling effect

All of this brings me to the most dangerous issue with the law, and that is that it will undeniably lead to censorship of journalistic and lawful speech. Remember how I explained that the law mandates that content creators track exactly how many minutes and seconds minors appear on screen? This applies to all content creators in Utah. Meaning it applies to journalists, activists, and documentarians.

Say a journalist is covering a rash of student protests. In order to comply with this law's vague and burdensome record-keeping requirements, they'd have to meticulously document potentially underage students featured in their footage on social media to ensure that certain kids aren't shown repeatedly enough to meet the threshold for a qualifying minor. It's an incredibly burdensome provision that requires a level of time and resources that most independent creators don't have. Especially because the law specifically allows that the content creator could be forced to cover the attorney fees and damages.

Then you have the issue of when a journalist on YouTube, TikTok, or Patreon is focusing coverage on one certain young activist or group. For instance, maybe they're covering or doing a whole series on someone like Greta Thunberg when she was a teenager, or the leader of a high school men's rights group, or a school shooter.

The law doesn't stipulate that any of these minors have to be filmed directly. Any content that features a minor's social media posts, their name, likeness, videos or or photos of them, or where the minor is the "subject of an oral narrative," is subject to regulation. This means that the subject of journalistic coverage could very quickly be deemed a qualifying minor under this child influencer law. And that means that the journalist or activist must now set up a trust for the young person that they're supposedly covering. They must also alert that person's parents.

Ari Cohn, lead counsel for Tech Policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said that the law is a nonsensical minefield that will undeniably lead to a chilling effect and defacto censorship of journalism.

"The compliance burden dissuades [people from speaking]," Cohn said. "It puts this burden on lawful speech and socially important speech if you're doing commentary for instance. To have to potentially even worry about whether you have to do things like keep all these intensive records, figure out who these kids' parents even are, it's going to dissuade people from speaking, and that's a dangerous place."

Miers seconded Cohn’s concerns, arguing that journalists may just avoid including minors entirely in their content, even in socially important contexts, to avoid costly litigation. The tracking burden alone creates chilling effects, she said, particularly for creators and journalists reporting on child abuse online. "We're creating this elaborate set of legal obligations that are not narrowly tailored to specific things," she said.

Censorship concerns

The most insane and dangerous part of this law, however, are the content removal requirements. Once a child turns 18, they can petition a court to force a content creator to delete or edit any content that they were featured in as a minor. All they have to do is claim that the content about them caused "emotional harm or substantial embarrassment." These are incredibly broad, vague and subjective determinations! And the law provides for an award of attorney fees and damages.

Cohn told me that qualifying minors, upon turning 18, could silence very important reporting. And the content doesn't have to even be about them. For instance, a minor could appear in protest footage showing the police assaulting an innocent protester. Once that minor turns 18 they could sue to have that news footage taken down off the internet, arguing emotional harm from appearing in a viral video, thus protecting the police.

Under this law, any narrative involving minors could be challenged, especially political or activist content. Again, this is lawful speech and lawful content produced by independent creators that the court is saying can be arbitrarily removed if a qualifying minor happens to appear in it.

Ari Cohn told me that this right of deletion is especially pernicious. He said, "The idea that a judge could order the deletion of content, even of a person in a public place, because a minor appears in that content, is disquieting, to say the least."

"Speech that has a minor in it doesn't just lose its protection because it has a minor in it," he said. "Speech that features minors isn't unprotected. There are several red flags and one is the burden this law sets up on people who want to speak."

“[The law] creates free expression concerns for activists and people who are chronicling activism by teenagers." (Getty images)

Miers said that this law could deter important public-interest reporting. Especially when you consider the legal costs. Most independent journalists who are operating on platforms like YouTube, Patreon, or Substack, don't have the resources to fight a lawsuit. If hit with a request like this, they'll simply take the content down.

There is a very vague "public interest" exemption, but as Cohn said, this only ensures creators and journalists face a legal minefield, inevitably prompting self-censorship rather than risking expensive litigation.

"Even though the court has to consider the creator's interest and the public interest in a right-to-deletion suit, the creator is still forced to spend time and probably a lot of money defending themselves over something that isn't even arguably unprotected," Cohn said. This is a problem with a lot of bills we've seen in recent years, these private rights of action in themselves allow for punishment by process."

The alleged safeguards written into the law, Cohn said, are essentially "worthless." At that point, "you're already bankrupt," he said, "You shouldn't need to go through expensive protracted litigation for speech that is lawful. The fact that you have to go through this process to get to the point where your speech is held to be protected is insane.

Daphne Keller, director of the platform regulation program at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center uncovered a slew of red flags in the law. She said that the takedown system concerned her, because such systems are often weaponized by bad actors. "In any legal system that creates a notice and take down system… [we see] very well documented patterns of abuse," she said. "People use those systems to try to silence online content that's [produced by] their commercial competitor or actually just speech they disagree with."

"There's also a pretty strong pattern of platforms just going ahead and taking down the things that somebody asked them to," she added, "Any new system like this, automatically is going to trigger that set of concerns about who is going to file bad faith allegations or even just mistaken allegations to try to get things taken down. And you get examples like politicians trying to take down evidence of their past misconduct, or governments trying to get videos of police brutality taken down. So there's that category of problems that I would foresee here".

"Everybody's acting like this [law] is about compensation and getting teenagers paid for their online work," Keller said. "But I absolutely think that it creates free expression concerns for activists and people who are chronicling activism by teenagers."

A lot of people hear about these laws and read these extremely lazy and biased articles, and they fail to consider how this type of legislation is weaponized in the courts by powerful people and bad actors. But I really urge anyone reading this to think about this stuff.

Before you support a law, especially one claiming to "protect kids online", think about how the worst people you could imagine will use that law. Think about how powerful people, corporations, bad actors, and right wing interest groups will weaponize that law. There is a massive crackdown on speech happening in this country, and these laws can easily be weaponized. Consider the fact that we are witnessing innocent, lawful permanent residents being seized by ICE and students having their visas revoked right now, because the government has deemed their speech critiquing US foreign policy as hate speech and terrorism.

Utah's terrible track record

It's also crucial to examine the context in which these child influencer laws are being passed. It's extremely notable that this most recent law, with some of the most extreme free speech implications, was passed in Utah, yet not a single journalist or content creator covering the law's passage even mentioned Utah's other legislative efforts in this space.

Before this child influencer law, other recent legislation that Utah's governor has signed, includes an anti-DEI bill prohibiting diversity efforts, a bill that mandates that all smartphones, tablets, computers sold in Utah come pre-installed with porn filtering software, and the governor, is working overtime to restrict rights of transgender youth and limit their access to essential gender-affirming care. Utah's governor has fought aggressively against the right to abortion, he recently banned collective bargaining for public employees, and Utah just became the first state to ban LGBTQ+ pride flags in government buildings and schools. Does any of this sound like they're actually interested in protecting children?

The state has also taken aggressive steps to directly crack down on online speech. Utah recently passed a law that would mandate app stores verify all users' ages and identities. The law also forces Apple and Google to get parental consent before allowing minors to download certain apps. The law, which also passed under the guise of "protecting children" helps law enforcement track and monitor all citizens' online behavior and ties people's offline identity to their online presence via their cell phone. It also makes it impossible for, say, an LGBTQ teen to access apps that might inform them about things like gay rights or reproductive justice, without parental consent.

Utah's governor even signed an even more extreme and restrictive law aimed at censoring the internet back in 2023 called the Social Media Regulation Act. Thankfully, the law has been struck down in the courts on free speech grounds.

But these laws, like the one they're now claiming will protect child influencers, are not one offs. They are all part of a years-long coordinated, national effort to chip away at our first amendment rights and civil liberties under the guise of "protecting children."

“Legislatures are passing these laws that control online speech, and then they just put in parentheses, 'but for the kids.’” (Getty images)

Eric Goldman, associate dean for research and professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute, has been chronicling Utah's bad tech policy for decades. "Utah has this abysmal track record when it comes to internet legislation," he said. "Legislatures are cracking down on speech across the globe and across the country and Utah is part of that."

"Legislatures are passing these laws that control online speech, and then they just put in parentheses, 'but for the kids,'" Goldman said. "There's really no censorship approach that legislators won't support, as long as you say, 'but it protects the kids!' One of the real questions that we as constituents should have is, 'how does that protect the kids? Are you following best practices?' [These laws] are being justified as child protection measures whether or not they actually accomplish that goal."

Jessica Melugin, director of the Center for Technology & Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-profit think tank that promotes limited government, said that there are "definitely first amendment problems with [Utah's] plan."

This child influencer law and others like Melugin said, could gradually erode fundamental First Amendment protections. "Utah has gone up against that line before," she said. A law, like their previous Social Media Regulation Act will get thrown out. Then, as Melugin said, "they come back and they try in different ways to get it across the finish line."

Nora Benavidez, a top civil rights and free speech attorney who serves as director of digital justice at Free Press, a pro-Democracy advocacy group, said that "people who are reporting on issues of public interest will get swept up in this [child influencer] law."

"We've seen over the last decade a rise in legislative proposals that narrow free speech rights, and with that there's been a narrowing of what's considered acceptable speech and acceptable viewpoints," Benavidez said. "These bills that would restrict free expression, particularly online, can absolutely become precedent setting. They showcase to the rest of the country and other state capitals that it's possible. It's possible to introduce and pass laws that will allow those in power to selectively approve the speech they like or dislike."

"Whatever you imagine this law could do, it will be worse. It will absolutely be used to go after speech and result in a chilling effect for those online," Benavidez said. "If this law is used as a vehicle to muzzle people under some pretext that their content features 32.1% of minors, that's a really shameful cover to ultimately just continue this kind of viewpoint, discrimination, that we've seen elsewhere throughout the Trump administration."

She added that the fact that this law places the full burden on users, like content creators and journalists, rather than social media companies is an immediate red flag.

What's terrifying, is that it sounds like absolutely no journalistic or civil liberties groups were involved in the drafting of this law. One group of family content creators did get together and hire a public affairs consultant, who helped shape the bill slightly. (He told me that, somehow, the law was even worse initially). But, he said, "the news content creators didn't have someone there advocating for their interests."

Keller said that she's worried about the sheer deluge of bad internet laws that are being passed right now that slide under the radar. Because there are so many irresponsible and potentially unconstitutional tech laws being passed, advocacy groups and civil liberties organizations don't have time to keep track, much less fight them all.

"States keep passing so many laws that are probably unconstitutional almost certainly conflict with Section 230, and even NetChoice can't litigate all of it," she said. "The public interest groups that work on this kind of thing, like the ACLU, will sometimes weigh in with amicus briefs, but they're also completely overwhelmed. I worry a lot about laws like this not making the cut for anybody to challenge, and then they're out there on the books, creating the chilling effects."

This is not a kids problem

So what can we do? Now that we know these child influencer laws are nothing but covert censorship bills that are at best ineffective and at worst incredibly dangerous, how do we actually protect kids? No one wants kids exploited online or used for views. No one wants that to happen to adults either.

I think it's so important to remember when we're having these conversations, that many of the issues around privacy, consent, and exploitation online don't just affect child influencers. They also affect adults, including many mentally ill or developmentally disabled people, the unhoused, and other vulnerable groups who are regularly exploited for content. This is something that all these irresponsible "think of the children" articles and videos never even acknowledge.

As the journalist Tanya Chen wrote in BuzzFeed back in 2021, in the past several years, low wage and service workers are increasingly subject to viral stunts and exploited for content. Drive-thrus and fast food franchises have become popular places for people to film pranks involving employees, almost always without their consent. We have created a world in which anyone can be recorded at any time and blasted out online to millions. It's a massive, crowd-sourced surveillance state that no one can opt out of.

In 2023, journalist Clarissa-Jan Lim dubbed this phenomenon Panopticontent. The word is play on the famous prison design characterized by a central observation tower, that allows guards to see all inmates at all times, without the inmates knowing if they are being watched.

"We film ourselves, we film our surroundings, we film the people we know and the people we don’t, and we post freely and carelessly," Lim wrote. "Everything is content, and everyone is a nonplayer character in my world. Our appetite to document and post — whether it’s ethical or not — is reinforced by the seduction of social media fame."

"There are whole genres of online content in which people are being recorded or photographed without their knowledge or consent — on the subway, at a shopping center, in a car, on the sidewalk, at a restaurant, at a bar," Lim wrote. "These strangers are displayed as a spectacle to gawk at and be judged by an audience of millions around the world. People experiencing homelessness are objects of pity and disgust. A couple making out in public are objects of ridicule."

Documenting people going about their everyday lives and turning it into online content is not a new phenomenon. However as people moved from flip phones to cell phones, to wearable sunglasses that can record anything in front of you with just a tap, the entire offline world became a stage for the internet. Filming people around you and in your life is incentivized by apps that run on algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement.

Now, if you catch someone in a particularly compromising or embarrassing position, you can film it, post it, and-- thanks to creator funds-- potentially profit from it. This is as true for someone filming a funny moment on the subway, as it is for a mommy vlogger filming their child's reaction to spicy food.

And the ability to film and post anything we see online is not an inherently bad or exploitative thing. Social media is often leveraged as a powerful social justice tool. Ordinary citizens documenting police interactions or acts of discrimination enable us to hold powerful people and institutions to account, especially when laws fail to do so.

A way forward

I think that the best, most durable solution to these problems is to slowly change cultural norms. As the journalist Rebecca Jennings writes, it’s up to audiences to shift cultural norms around what’s acceptable behavior online and what isn’t. We already see successful instances of this with children. Just a decade ago, people freely posted photos of their babies with their full faces showing online. Now, for many, it's customary to cover the baby's face with an emoji. I think this is a good first step.

We also need to recognize that different people have fundamentally different belief systems around how they view children. Many conservatives, for instance, view underage children as property. This inherently regressive notion leads to laws like what we're seeing in Utah and elsewhere with things like the Kids Online Safety Act. These laws are not about child safety, they're about giving parents the power to retain ultimate control over everything their child reads, consumes, and says online.

"I get it, you worry about your kid," Melugin said. "You don't want them to stumble into something harmful online, and you don't want them to turn into phone zombies. But here's the reality: the internet is here to stay. These kids are going to need to grow into good digital citizens, to find social groups, to get information, to do schoolwork, to get jobs, to do all those things they will need to go online. Keeping them from [the internet] is not setting them up for success in the reality of the world they're going to enter even as adults."

“The law treats a 17 year old exactly the same as a three year old, ignoring the fact that one has agency over establishing their own online presence and one does not.”

I'd argue that we should start recognizing children's autonomy from the minute they're born. Yes, in so many ways your child feels like an extension of yourself, and I think it's powerful for moms to be able to go online and talk freely and openly about their experiences as parents. But we also need parents to recognize that children deserve the right to privacy too.

While the ethical considerations of family vlogging do warrant discussion, the disproportionate media attention the topic of family vlogging receives and the framing of most articles is deeply irresponsible. I've reported on the content creator industry for nearly 16 years. I've watched generations of kids who grew up on family channels or in the public eye become adults without consequence. Many, as I write about in my book, speak positively about their parents and their experiences.

The inaccurate and irresponsible media coverage of child influencers only serves to push a moral panic around the massive, multi billion dollar influencer industry, which provides jobs and opportunities to thousands of young people.

Melugin said that Utah's law appears to have been written and passed on the heels of a media firestorm about the case of Ruby Franke, which is not a good recipe for legislation. "I have to believe [the law] was driven by a lot of political attention around the documentary," she said. "That's certainly no way to make good policy. You [should] make policy based on the constitutional limits of what legislators should be able to do and this one seems to be beyond that… Making laws based on outrageous exceptions and bad cases is not good policy."

The moral panic around child influencers also overshadows the much broader, systemic issue of data privacy that affects all children, not just those in the public eye.​ Data brokers can pose a significant threat to children's privacy by collecting, aggregating, and selling extensive personal information, without consent. This data includes highly personal details about kids including their names, addresses, age, gender, interests, and even sensitive details like geolocation and health information. That data can be used against these children to deny them healthcare, educational opportunities, and job opportunities.

Children do not have to grow up on a family vlog to suffer these consequences, these are the real threats to children's privacy that affect all children. And they're threats that journalists covering child influencer freakouts constantly ignore.

The law removes young people’s agency over their own online careers. (Getty images)

The sheer volume of data amassed on children is staggering. Half of American teens use the internet "almost constantly," most have their own smartphones by age 11 and use computers and digital devices in school. This provides ample opportunities for data collection. And while U.S. lawmakers are happy to pass endless censorship bills dressed up as "child protection" laws, we are one of the few developed countries that lack comprehensive federal data privacy regulation.

The unchecked activities of data brokers not only infringe upon children's privacy but also expose them to risks such as identity theft, manipulation, and long-term profiling that can affect future opportunities for life. By focusing on these systemic ways that all children are exploited for profit online, rather than feeding into sensationalized moral panics about influencers, we can create a safer, more respectful digital environment for all young and vulnerable users.​

As Nora Benavidez said about the Utah child influencer law, "I'm skeptical of any piece of legislation that offsets a burden from a social media company to a user. When users are tasked with the burden of fact checking their own data privacy considerations and protecting their own civil rights online, it creates an environment in which these large conglomerate companies are incentivized to do anything but protect users."

We should not allow the media and ignorant commentators to normalize censorship bills under the false promise of child safety. Real child safety means confronting greedy corporations or bad actors who profit from exploiting minors' privacy, not censoring independent creators. HB 322 will hand abusive parents more power, stifle independent journalism, and do nothing to address the systemic problem that's at the root of all of this: The fact that our entire internet is designed for profit, not people.

So when you see another law like this crop up. Before blindly backing it, making a TikTok, or posting about it online, ask yourself who's truly benefiting from these speech restrictions-- because it's certainly not kids.

It took me weeks of reporting to put together this article and to speak to the nearly a dozen actual free speech and legal experts about this law, something not a single mainstream media journalist did. Please become a paid subscriber today so I can continue this work.

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