The Commoditization of Privacy, or Why to Stop Posting About Your Babies on Social Media
I used to be obsessed with social media. Seeing acquaintances grow up, buy houses, get married, have children — the beauty of social media comes from the idea that you are experiencing these joyous moments with them, and when you consider sites like Reddit and Twitter as the go-between for text-based socializing, suddenly you’re experiencing these things with people you don’t even know.
I’m 28, which, if I’m correct, places me firmly in the “millennial” arena. I grew up with the internet, from those first dial-up days to our high-speed multi-G WiFi accessible machines. I didn’t get a Facebook until high school, Twitter until undergrad, and Instagram somewhere in between. I never signed up for Vine or TikTok (though I like watching compilations from both on YouTube). I broke up with social media a few weeks ago. The feeling was mutual: the relationship just wasn’t working anymore. Admittedly, breaking away from social media wasn’t difficult: by the time I got into it, I was a mostly-fully-formed human, and have always been an introvert and a private person.
My concern lies primarily with the younger generation, and specifically, the children my generation are giving birth to right about now. All over my Facebook feed I saw cute babies, anywhere from minutes to weeks out of the womb. I watched my friends’ baby’s first smile, their first walk, their first laugh. In person, I’ve heard them scream when mommy didn’t hand over her phone fast enough, pudgy two-year-old fingers quickly navigating to the YouTube app quicker than even I could manage — and my brain is actually developed!
You’re probably asking, “what’s wrong with this?” You might be judging my friend for handing over her phone when her baby demands it, or proudly looking over your own feed at all the cute photos and videos and moments you were savvy enough to capture and post so your family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, professors, students, mentors/ees, and randos could share in your joy.
But that becomes a problem. Your baby can’t consent to any of this. Those photos you put up with your kids in the tub? The album you made at your daughter’s dance recital? The video of your son waving a Trump or Biden flag, sitting happily on your shoulders? Your child isn’t aware of any of that happening. Your baby only barely recognizes its own name (and the bright red YouTube app on your phone). Those excuses parents drag out — “It’s easier to share photos this way” or “I’m saving them for when they get older” or the million-and-a-half other reasons why you would want to post them on social media — they never consider the child. It is always, and always will be, about the parent.
More importantly, by putting children on the internet at earlier stages of their lives, children are growing up used to the idea that privacy is only a concept, an idea, and can’t fully understand the importance of it. For them, privacy isn’t a right, but a privilege.
I don’t plan on having children. Fortunately, my husband and I are on the same page. If children do happen, I told my husband we will not post about them on social media. Not until they are old enough to recognize the consequences of being out in the world. Photos and videos can be sent over text message. They can call grandma and grandpa as often as they like. Family will always have access to them. But they will not have a presence on social media until they’re old enough to consent.
The reason I’m like this — the boogeyman I fear — comes from the fact that privacy is now a luxury. Pre-social media (the “dark ages”), it was assumed that celebrities are, by the volition of their “brand,” freely accessible to the public. They put themselves “out there” to be consumed, and there will be people who will gorge. They can try to deny this feast — privacy walls at their estate, secret hours, alternative exits to their opaque-windowed cars — but they exist for our pleasure. I’m not saying it’s right (it’s actually disgusting) but the point to be made is about social dynamics: it used to be that everyone could have a discreet private life while a select few couldn’t. Those select few were being compensated for the extreme violations of their privacy. Now, not only are people encouraging others to look into the window of their lives (for free!), they’re taking others along for the ride, others who have no ability to consent.
What does this do to children, I wonder? What happens when the two-year-old becomes sixteen, and finds the embarrassing photos and videos their parent(s) thought to post on Facebook for no reason other than to have something to share?
Many people believe that young people simply do not care about privacy — and data would seemingly support this. But, like all complicated issues, that’s not the whole story, and other data suggests otherwise. And Gen-Zers are operating at an enormous disadvantage: they’ve never lived in a world where privacy is optional. Since they were babies, they were expected to perform for social media, told that having social media accounts would make them more popular in school, look towards influencers as an aspirational career choice, and had social media ingratiated into every facet of their lives to the point where even if they did choose to go offline, they would still need to rely on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc. accounts to interact with the digital space. It’s not fair to say “young people don’t care about privacy” when young people have hardly had the chance to consider a world where they could have privacy, or understand if privacy is important to them.
“Should I delete social media” is a bigger question than most people think. For people like me, who made hollow excuses to keep it, the answer is a resounding “yes,” and I’m much better for it. But I also had a long time to live without social media in my life, and I knew from a young age to value my privacy. For other people, the answer might be “no,” and that’s still fine as long as you came into the game a little late.
For children and teenagers, this question is exceptionally difficult. They grew up on social media, in the public whether they liked it or not, and whether we like it or not, adults are responsible for that.
First, for parents of children and teens, I need to broadcast an important warning: do not post everything about your child on your social media accounts. I can’t stress this enough. Every time you post, you are creating a digital record, which means every time you post about your child/grandchild/anyone else, you are creating or informing a digital record for them. More importantly, you are broadcasting information about them that they can’t consent to, which means every cute, embarrassing photo or video will live forever, and they or their peers can dig them up. This leaves them open to self-esteem issues and potential bullying. Finally — and I think this will raise the hackles of plenty of parents — you’ve got to stop using your children as content farms. To put it bluntly: by posting about your child on your behalf, you are dissociating their personhood from them and turning them into an object. Think about it this way: there is no real benefit to the child when you post about them on social media, but there is a very tangible benefit to you. Your child doesn’t receive any of the social capital that comes with cute bath time photos and videos of their first walk — you do. Your child might be cooed over, but most of the time they don’t even know about it (and potentially never will). I get that “you’re turning your baby into an object” is seemingly dramatic, but you, the parent, are the only thinking-feeling-doing human behind the post; your child is just a prop in it, an image.
That doesn’t mean you can’t ever post anything with them in it, but ask yourself every time you do: am I posting this for myself, or for the benefit of my child? Are these pictures I can email or text to their grandparents, or make an album on my computer? Does what I’m about to post have to be on social media?
Second, for children and teens, I like Jaron Lanier’s advice in this video. Responding to a question about deleting social media accounts, Lanier says:
If you’re a young person and you’ve only lived with social media, your first duty is to yourself. You have to know yourself. You should experience travel, you should experience challenge to yourself, you need to know yourself, and you can’t know yourself without perspective. So at least give it six months without social media … get rid of the whole thing for six months and know yourself, and then you can decide.
I like this advice because it acknowledges that young people have been on social media since they were born, and separating them from it could potentially be traumatic. It also highlights an important issue unique to social media: doing things for the sake of shareable moments (or “do it for the ‘gram” syndrome). You should want to explore without the pressure of constantly needing to post a photo or a cute tag or a video highlighting the best moments of your adventure. So take six months, delete social media, and do the things you want to do without feeling like you must look a certain way or do something spectacular just to show all of your friends. And after six months, if you realize that living that way is what makes you happy, then hop back on. But if you realize it doesn’t, you’ve now made the transition to permanent deletion far easier on yourself.
This previous advice applies to a narrow group of people: children who wait until they’re thirteen to start their own social media accounts, with no public record of themselves to be had. But what about children who have had their faces splashed over the internet? The boogeyman isn’t experiential, right? It’s all conjecture … except it isn’t. An article in Slate from 2019 highlighted Christie Tate and her mommy blog, an extreme case of freely-sharing parenting. Her daughter was in fourth grade (about nine or ten years old) when she discovered her mother’s blog, which contained pictures and text about her daughter (among other relationships and individuals in her life). The adolescent was conscious of her identity being online, and the request to take down the content was met with a harsh dose of re-examining the boundaries of parenthood and childhood.
It needs to be emphasized that this case is extreme. Tate wrote an article herself explaining why she can’t stop writing about her daughter and she brings up a valid point: motherhood is an important part of her that she expresses through writing, so where does the line exist between parent and child’s individual experiences?
This line is a muddier in writing, but on video, the child is either front-and-center or a cute accessory to the family’s journey. Think about every single family-centered YouTube channel on the website, how often they turn the cameras on their cute kids and teach them to perform for the internet. The most popular ones all seem to have something in common: the children are young, babies to preteens, and rarely feature anyone in their teens or older. The subscribers number in the hundreds of thousands to the millions. It’s entirely possible that the children enjoy the attention or performance, but there’s a strong chance the child doesn’t have many memories of not having to act for the camera, and whether they enjoy it or not is irrelevant when you consider that they cannot consent to the content being produced on their behalf.
You can’t have a Facebook account until you’re 13 years old. Same with Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit. And yet, the internet is filled to the brim with content featuring children and babies in an effort to … share their cute photos? Accumulate “likes”? Make dad’s ex jealous? Why, as a society, have we decided privacy is an inconvenience in our pursuit of more engagement?
Privacy is a concern in several amendments to the Constitution. Of course, this applies to privacy from the government, but we clearly value privacy enough to enshrine it in a foundational document. Additionally, there actually is a bill called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), but it hasn’t been updated since 2000, long before people were mass-posting pictures of their child’s first laugh for the world to see. If we’re going to allow children to be props on the internet, the least we could do is block out their faces and refer to them by pseudonyms. Ideally, pictures and videos featuring children will be heavily scrutinized to determine if the child’s best interest lies in their identity being splashed across the internet, and research conducted to determine what the consequences of these instances of overexposure lead to. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe the children are pliable and this will have no effect on them. Considering how fully-formed adult minds are so susceptible to manipulation on social media, I have my doubts.
