Is #instamom ethical?: An investigation into the ethics of an increasingly popular social media phenomenon
Have you ever watched a video or meme of Mila Stauffer, the precocious 3-year old with over 3.8 Million followers? Been one of the 7,000 “likers” on a cute photo of a toddler posted publicly on Instagram by their mom? Followed the #babiesofinstagram or #cutebabypics hashtags?
The rise in popularity of social media and highly-visible social media influencers over the last decade has blurred the boundaries between the public and private spheres. This boundary is emphasized by the rise of “Insta-moms” — mothers, and an increasing number of fathers, who post photos of their children publicly. A recent BuzzFeed article provided insight on one of the most popular “Insta-moms”, Mila’s mom, who can receive sponsorships for photos of her daughter of up to $500,000 [1].
We believe that publicly posting photos of children on social media is unethical. Our ethical concerns are motivated by (1) children’s inability to provide informed consent, (2) infringement of child privacy, and (3) harmful psychological effects of a large social media presence for children.
We will first provide background information on these three concerns, supported by collected comments from Instagram users. We will then show results from interviews with “Insta-moms”. We compiled our background research and interviews into an article suggesting better practices for parents posting child photos on social media, and formulated a list of features, with mock-ups, for social media companies such as Instagram to adopt. We distributed our article to social media users and discussed our feature recommendations with product managers at social media companies.
Background Information
Informed Consent
Children should have a right to their own clean digital footprint [4] because they cannot give “informed consent”. The use of minimum age requirements in decisions such as voting, joining the military, and watching R-rated movies suggests that these decisions require an informed understanding that young children may not have. As social media becomes increasingly global and public, decisions regarding one’s digital footprint falls under this category. Furthermore, if a child is too young to make an informed agreement to having their photo publicly posted, then the parent is making an unethical decision to post it on their behalf.
International courts have started to encounter cases involving this judgement on informed child consent. In 2016, an 18-year-old Austrian woman sued her parents for publicly posting baby photos of her online and later refusing to delete them [5]. While as a toddler she may have unwittingly agreed, at a more mature age the defendant clearly is uncomfortable with a digital footprint created by her parents. The defendant stated,
“They knew no shame and no limit — and didn’t care whether it was a picture of me sitting on the toilet or lying naked in my cot — every stage was photographed and then made public”.
Furthermore, in France parents now face a year in prison and a fine up to 45,000 euros for sharing “intimate details” of their child’s private life without consent [6]. Although traditionally parents provide consent in the name of their children, this clearly must be questioned when parents make unethical decisions.
Consent becomes even murkier because of sponsorships that parents can receive through posting product-related content on Instagram. Parents who have a large enough following on Instagram, such as Mila Stauffer’s mother, can negotiate with companies to publicly post photos of their children with sponsored products. Currently, social media companies do not dictate how much, if any, revenue from these partnerships are set aside for the children in these ads. This creates an financial incentive for parents to publicly post photos of their children without their consent.
However, in the entertainment industry, these practices are regulated. The 1939 Coogan’s Bill created regulations mandating that child entertainers (actresses, singers, etc.) receive protected accounts for money earned — accounts that their parents cannot access. Because the money does not go directly to the parents, parents are less likely to pressure a child to participate in sponsored entertainment activity. But because no such legislation exists for these sponsorships on social media, the parent is monetarily incentivized to encourage their children to promote products. This creates an unethical situation.
Child Privacy
These public posts also infringe on the child’s privacy. Because these photos are public, they can be reposted, viewed, and used by anyone on the internet. In fact, some child pornography sites source content from social media. By posting photos publically, “Insta-moms” endanger a child’s identity, and make it easier for their photos to be used for nefarious purposes.
For example, Utah-mother Brittany Champagne in 2015 discovered that her 8-year old child’s photos, that she publicly posted on Instagram, were being re-used by pornagraphy. Her child’s face was “re-posted” on social media with hashtags linking to several pornagraphy sites, thus putting her daughter’s identity at risk [4]. Furthermore, an Australian study found that roughly 50% of child photos posted on pedophile sites were sourced from social media [4]. Parenting experts suggest “Insta-moms” utilize more private social media platforms such as WhatsApp to better protect privacy [7].
By sharing their child’s identity publicly on social media, “Insta-moms” are unethically compromising their children’s privacy.
Psychological Effects on Children
Because the rise of Instagram mothers and mommy bloggers is a relatively new phenomenon, very few research studies have examined the effects of a large, sustained social media presence on children under the age of five. To learn more, we reached out to teachers in the hopes of learning from their decades of experience of intimately working with the young children in the age range we were interested in.
We spoke with Adrienne Gelpi Lomangino, the Head Teacher at Bing Nursery and the first author of multiple research papers covering early child development and psychology. Lomangino noted that children need genuine interactions and exchanges with their parents. When parents instruct a child how to pose for a certain picture or which direction to look, parent-child interactions are damaged, interrupting the natural back-and-forth between a parent and child. This natural exchange is critical for a child’s development: they need eye contact to build trust and understanding, and need to feel that they are being listened to.
This understanding serves as a warning for Instagram mothers, who often post multiple photos every single day that are perfectly curated for their hundreds of thousands of followers. When a mother and child’s natural interactions are interrupted to pose and take a photo designed to please the thousands of strangers who follow that mother on Instagram, their scripted exchange is detrimental in shaping the child’s view of reality. The behaviors that these mothers normalize for their children are, in fact, not normal at all. Children should not grow up in their most crucial developmental stages with the expectation that every moment to be posed and scripted. They should be able to freely develop, laugh, grow, learn, and have genuine moments with their loved ones that are not interrupted with an intrusive recording device.
The increasing popularity of Instagram mothers create a warped, harmful understanding for current and future mothers about the best ways to communicate with their children. Ultimately, Lomangino explains, parents need to be present with their children and love the child that they have, rather than work tirelessly to curate an idealistic view of their child.
Finally, these interactions can be damaging for the child’s psyche as they grow older. Researchers have found that social media exposes children to cyber-bullying, unwanted attention from strangers, and an altered sense of reality(2). Moreover, among adolescents and teenagers over the age of 12, the Royal Society of Public Health found Instagram to be the most harmful for users in the aforementioned age range (3).
Thus, once the child has reached an age where they can understand all the attention, both desirable and undesirable, they receive, they may suffer damages to their psyche as a result. The crucial point here is that the child did not choose to receive that attention, and this puts the child in a lose-lose situation: if the child enjoys the attention, then it is likely that the high volumes of attention the child receives will create an unrealistic view of the world for the child, and if the child does not enjoy the attention, then it will be extremely hard for them to escape from it since their parents have been sustaining their online presence from a very young age.
Engagement
To learn more about how parents currently engage with these ethical issues, we contacted Instagram moms directly. We reached out to mothers with both small and large followings.
We directly messaged 70 Instagram moms asking for feedback, and received 5 responses, and one lead to a phone interview. Below are some highlights from their feedback.
“I have had quite a few friends whose photos have been stolen and it does bother me that Instagram doesn’t have a more immediate solution and doesn’t block users from repeatedly starting new accounts and continuing to steal content.”
We very frequently heard that mothers have a hard time making sure their photos of their children aren’t being stolen. Currently the only ways they can defend their photos is by reporting and blocking offending users, and using watermarks on their photos to deter people from using their photos without permission.
“I do wish that Instagram spent less time policing things like nipples on breastfeeding accounts and spent more time policing the creep shows and making the report feature more functional.”
Given that the report feature is one of the primary modes of defense for these Instagram moms, they are very frustrated with the lack of transparency of the feature. It is unclear to a user when or if a a report they submitted resulted in any action, and that ultimately reduces confidence in the system.
“I’ve had people repost my photos and videos without my consent and have also had people take photos of my children in public and then posted them on their accounts.”
This is not only an issue with other users stealing photos, but also an issue with other people taking new photos of someone else’s child and posting it. Since the latter situation has to do with uploading of unique photos, parents want some way of knowing when photos of their children are posted on other accounts.
“ I typically don’t post our location or post live unless we’re in a public place like Disneyland. Even if I do post on location, I usually wait until we leave the area.”
Geotagging photos can leave a trail of locations you like to visit with your children, and also give out your real time location if you are posting in real time. Some parents are aware of this and are careful with their geolocation habits, but not all mothers are so informed.
Suggested Features Recommendations for Social Media Companies
Using our background research and interviews, we compiled a list of feature recommendations for Instagram and Facebook to implement to address the safety of children on social media and engage with our ethical concerns.
Prevent geotagging when a child is in the photo
Social media users are often unaware of how much information can be providing by frequently geotagging. This feature would detect if a child is present in a post and then disable geotagging for the photo. Disabling geotagging outright would be the most effective, but it may help to disable geotagging only if the user is still at the location where the photo was taken.
Child Photo Notifications
Parents are concerned that random users or accounts will post photos of their kids. This feature would use facial recognition to detect when a photo of a specific user’s child is posted by a different account. Then, the parent’s account would be notified. The notification would allow the parent to interact with the offender and resolve the situation.
Child Photo Confirmation
Many parents agree that photos of children should follow stricter guidelines than other photos. This feature would detect a child in the photo you want to post and ask the user to confirm that it follows the stricter child photography guidelines in order to keep them safe.
Built-in Watermark
Instagram moms frequently told us that watermarks can deter other accounts from stealing or reposting their photos, or at least encourages outside sources to ask for permission before reposting. Social media companies should add a watermark option for users to easily add to their photos. The watermark could appear only when other users try to take a screenshot or copy the image.
More Functional/Transparent Reporting
Instagram moms currently police their fanbase and report suspicious or inappropriate users. A common complaint about the current reporting process is that it is slow. If the reporting system provided updates or confirmation throughout the process, community members would be more confident in reporting posts that make them uncomfortable.
Detecting new accounts
This feature would detect when a user who has previously reported/blocked creates a new account. The user would be notified about the new account so that they could choose to block the new account as well.
Notify of screenshots
This feature would notify an account owner if another user takes a screenshot or uses a reposting app to create a copy of their image. This would allow the photo owner to easily contact the 3rd party to resolve the situation or report them.
Improved Community Guides
Social media companies like Instagram have insufficient community guidelines and parent guides. The current guides don’t address or advise parents who post photos of their children. These companies should acknowledge that photos of children should be handled with extra care — and include extra guidelines to raise awareness amongst all users.
Impacts of Actions Taken
Overall, we directly communicated with 5 Insta-moms, and reached out to 70. This exceeded our expectations, as we did not predict that we would receive many responses from the Insta-moms (the ones we received responses from have tens of thousands of followers). We worked closely with the feedback from these mothers to create recommendations that would help them protect their child’s privacy. In one instance, we were even featured on an Insta-mom’s Instagram story, directly exposing our work to her 12,000+ followers.
We published two articles: one geared towards Instamoms (can be found here) and another geared towards a more technical audience. We were very pleased with the distribution of the articles: we emailed or messaged them to every mother we reached out to, and received positive responses from everyone who responded. Our original intent was to have our the first article published on a popular “mommy blogs”. Unfortunately, we contacted around 15 of them, and of the two we heard back from, one requested a payment of $50.00 for the publication and the other was excited to publish it, but because of her backlog, scheduled our article for publication in June.
In the vein of increasing conversation about this topic as much as possible, we also engaged directly with the fans and followers of the most popular Instamom pages. Over 15 users directly responded to our concerns, leading to (often) heated discussions in the comments section of these pages. The photos that our comments received the most replies and discussions had well over 40,000 likes each, and we are glad that we were able to pose our concerns to the large number of people who engaged with each photo.
One of our original intended impacts was to work with Instagram employees directly to craft new policies concerning the ethical issues at hand. We attempted to contact a few Instagram employees, who declined to speak with us due to privacy concerns. We also corresponded with a technology lawyer to help us draft effective legislative policies, but she pulled out last minute due to personal reasons. We were thus unable to complete our intended goals in this area.
As a result, we decided instead to create feature proposals for Instagram ourselves, and reached out to Product Managers at both Twitter and Google to receive feedback on the feasibility of our ideas. On March 8th, 2018, we submitted these completed feature ideas to Instagram, but have not yet received any response from them.
Finally, we also performed a lot of background research on child privacy issues and the influences of social media on child psychology. This research led us to interview the Head Teacher at Bing Nursery.
Conclusion
Ultimately, we believe that children have the right to have a clean digital footprint, unaltered without their consent. As Instagram opens up new spaces and methods of communicating, society needs to be aware of privacy violations in the blurred public/private sphere. Companies need to be thoughtful about how their platform can be abused and follow up with stricter regulations regarding their platform’s use.
In the meantime, as federal/state legislation catches up with the new social spheres that these technologies create, we believe mothers need to be informed of the dangers of posting their child’s photos online. Furthermore, social media companies have an obligation to create features to keep children safer on their platforms.
Works Cited
1- https://www.buzzfeed.com/remysmidt/mila-emma-katie-stauffer?utm_term=.qgMzMlzOb#.haDk3okNP
2 — https://sites.ewu.edu/cmst496-stafford/2012/06/06/the-effects-of-social-media-on-children/
3 — https://www.rsph.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/status-of-mind.html
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