The risks of “sharingnting”, the exposure of children by their parents on the Internet, targeted at the Assembly
Typing “family” in the search bar of social networks is enough to find hundreds of public accounts dedicated to the narration of family daily newspapers: since 2016, a couple in their thirties have been documenting their life as globetrotters with their three children on YouTube, between presentation of children’s rooms, sharing of family travel experiences or even videos dedicated to birthdays. On TikTok, a Breton family is a hit with the staging of their 3-year-old child called “Tchouni”, a blonde who is unanimous when he prepares coffees, cooks or plays cards with his dad. More than 900,000 Internet users follow his daily life on the platform, and more than 300,000 to scrutinize the life of the family on Instagram.
This trend of posting images of their children on social networks has a name: the sharentingcontraction of two English words sharing (share) and parenting (parenthood). For Bruno Studer, Renaissance deputy for Bas-Rhin, this phenomenon is above all one of the main risks of invasion of the privacy of minors. To guarantee respect for the image rights of children, the elected official tabled a bill in mid-January. The text will be examined Monday, March 6 in the National Assembly, in first reading.
“These are photos that can be the subject of child ****ography misuse, or give rise to harassment in the school setting”, explains Bruno Studer. Parents lose control over the distribution of their images. The bill recalls that 50% of the photographs that are exchanged on child ****ography forums were initially published by parents on their social networks.
” THE two first articles place the protection of privacy as one of the missions of parents as holders of parental authority for the exercise of which they must obviously involve the child. explains the MP, who defends himself against a repressive law. Article 4 is the flagship measure of the bill: “In the most extreme cases, it is provided that the family court judge can entrust a third party with the exercise of the image rights of children”adds Bruno Studer, member of the children’s rights delegation, created in September 2022.
Hoaxes at the expense of the child
Convinced that this subject is at the heart of the issues of our time, Mr. Studer has made it one of his battles. Without claiming to provide a miracle response to these practices, but with the ambition of alerting parents. “When we make a bill, it is also to put a subject up for debate”, affirms the deputy, former teacher of history-geography and civic education, who was in this context a spectator of the place that the Internet takes in the daily life of adolescents. The parliamentarian was already on the initiative of the influencer child law adopted in 2020, the first step in this desire to regulate the exploitation of children’s images online. The objective was to protect the remunerative activities of minors on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Twitch.
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