If you have a young person in your life with access to the internet, you've probably come across a 'kid-fluencer' or two; young people unboxing toys or testing skin care is a growing trend online. An influencer with more than one million followers on social media can earn $20,000 for a sponsored post and it's raising complex legal and ethical questions.
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00:00Yeah, this is a very lucrative way for children to make money online.
00:06Like you mentioned before, a kid fluencer who has more than a million followers can
00:11charge advertisers up to $20,000 USD.
00:16If you think about one of the most well-known child toy unboxer, Ryan Kaji, he started at
00:21the age of two years old on YouTube, and his net worth is about $30 million USD, and that
00:28was just him simply started unboxing toys in front of a camera.
00:32So yeah, there's a lot of money to be made in this industry.
00:35Kids have, you know, when you think about social media and how we're no longer seeing
00:39children watching TV, they've got their own iPads, you think of platforms like YouTube
00:44Kids and where this platform hosts these children to target other children on this app.
00:50It looks exciting, it's fun, the ability to own all these toys sent from advertisers,
00:57it just makes it look really exciting.
00:58So I can see why children would aspire to become a kid fluencer compared to like the
01:03conventional jobs that, you know, I would have once upon a time when I was a kid.
01:08So yeah, it's just in your face and it just makes sense.
01:12There's not enough laws in place to actually protect child toy unboxers or kid fluencers
01:17in general.
01:18What we have seen though is that a few countries around the world, there's two states in America
01:22and France have provided laws in place to protect the financial earnings of the kid
01:28fluencer.
01:29But in terms of the child's independency, in terms of parental control, privacy rights,
01:33that's where we start to see the murkiness of these practices and it's hard to actually
01:38determine how does this actually work considering parents are involved, advertisers, children
01:44aren't necessarily going to the studio to create the content, they're doing it in the
01:47comfort of their own home.
01:49So this all feeds into the complexity of the kid fluencer world.
01:53It's the parents that actually create the social media account on behalf of their children.
01:58And so already you start to see this co-dependency between the child and the parent.
02:02In order for a child influencer to exist, they need a parent.
02:06But also the fact that the child content creation, it's the child's face that is required in
02:13order for this content to be successful.
02:16And so thinking about this new law, how much can we really control kid fluencers to no
02:22longer exist on social media, it's a bit hard to say.
02:25And so I think it's just going to be a matter of seeing whether there might be some new
02:29policies to create more restrictions, but the best way that we need to look is how do
02:34we best protect and empower these children who do exist online considering it is made
02:39up of lots of tensions.