From ultrasound photos to family blogs: How ethical is posting children online?

Shari Franke, the daughter of American family blogger and convicted child abuser Ruby Franke, has spoken out about a childhood spent in front of the camera and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother.

The House of My Mother, published on Wednesday in Australia, is the first memoir by a former child influencer. In it, the now 21-year-old details a childhood in which every minute was mined for content on Ruby’s YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which had 2.3 million subscribers at its peak.

Franke refers to her childhood as the “Ruby Show” and a “surreal version of The Truman Show for her social media disciples”, where behind the glossy surface lay a much darker reality.

In her new memoir, Shari Franke (left) writes of the abuse she experienced at the hands of her mother, Ruby Franke.Credit: © MANICPROJECT; supplied

The eldest of six, Franke was 12 when her mother started documenting her life. “This constant surveillance was excruciating,” she wrote of this time. “All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded.”

In 2023, Ruby was arrested, and in February last year was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison for physical and emotional abuse involving Franke and her five siblings.

As the first generation of children to have had their childhood documented online grows up, more young adults like Franke are speaking out.

And while Franke’s story is extreme, it raises ethical, legal and developmental questions about the implications of sharing photos and videos of children online, whether they’re being viewed by an audience of fans or simply friends and family.

What are the risks of posting children online?

Dr Catherine Archer is a researcher at Edith Cowan University who has been studying children and social media for over a decade. Parents today have to navigate what she calls the “privacy paradox”, where a desire to share images of children online often overrides their desire to protect them from harm.

For influencers, “there’s a lot of money to be made, and that comes with this paradox of wanting to keep your family safe, while meeting the demands from brands because pictures of children are often what get the clicks”, she says.

But even for parents sharing images and videos of their children without financial gain – a phenomenon known as “sharenting” – there are privacy risks.

Madeleine Dobson, an associate professor at Curtin University with expertise in early childhood and care, says parents should be thinking about their kids’ digital footprint even before they are born.

A 2018 study from Australia examined ultrasound images and videos posted on Instagram, and found a significant portion of these images on public accounts contained metadata about the mother and unborn child, including hospital names and confidential medical information.

“Parents should also consider the long-term impact of their child’s digital footprint. When a child’s online identity is established before they are old enough to provide informed consent, it raises significant concerns about their privacy and autonomy in the future,” said a spokesperson from the eSafety Commissioner.

A core area of Dobson’s research is the developmental impacts of social media. She says children who grow up with content of themselves shared online, particularly on a large platform, can feel a sense of disassociation.

“Some children have talked about the experiences of seeing edited images or videos of themselves where they don’t feel a strong sense of resonance with what has been captured,” she says. “That can be quite difficult for children and young people to reconcile.”

Then there are the risks that can come when images of children get into the wrong hands. An investigation by the ABC’s Four Corners last year found many cases of men making inappropriate and sexual comments on photos of children, often on accounts run by parents. It also found cases of fraudulent copycat accounts.

A spokesperson from the eSafety commissioner said, “once an image is posted to social media, it can be shared more widely than intended, often in ways parents and carers may not anticipate or control”.

Remembering it’s OK to change your mind

Steph Claire Smith, a 30-year-old Australian influencer and co-founder of fitness app Kic, has been sharing her life online since she was 17. So when her son Harvey, now 3½, was born, it felt natural he would be part of her online world too. But recently, Smith has stopped posting images showing her son’s face on social media.

Steph Claire Smith.Credit: Eamon Gallagher

Smith says she and her partner Josh made the decision after Harvey was recognised and approached by strangers in public several times, even when she wasn’t with him.

“I was so uncomfortable with that because, number one, it’s super confusing for a little toddler as to why this stranger is coming up and knowing his name. But it’s also very problematic and dangerous. It just didn’t feel right,” she says.

Given he will start school in a few years, Smith is also hoping to protect Harvey from what other children might potentially say to him should they see him on their parents’ phones.

“I’m doing my best to hopefully avoid some sort of bullying from the fact that his mum has such a wide audience,” she says.

With another child on the way, Smith says she and Josh are still considering how their baby will be involved in her online presence, if at all.

“It’s a new age of parenting, having everything online, and I’m sure that we’ll learn a lot over the next decade … so I’m just trying to give myself some grace and not being too hard on myself for mistakes that I might make now.”

“[But] I think I’ve found my way of being able to share my motherhood experience and our family life without necessarily including their face and things like that,” she says.

Consent and agency

While Smith says Harvey is still too young to understand the true weight of her 1.4 million followers, she says consent has always been important to her, even now that she’s sharing less of him online.

“Maybe he’s doing something cute, and I pull out my phone because I want to memory bank that for myself, and he’s like, ‘No, Mum, no photos’. I’ve really respected that because I want him to know that I take that kind of thing really seriously.”

But when are children able to give consent? Dobson believes conversations around consent can start from age three or four.

Parents can begin discussing consent with their children regarding photos and videos on social media around age three or four.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

“Of course, with younger children, you’d want to do it in an age-appropriate and sensitive way. But it’s a good time to start talking about themes around boundaries and permissions, thinking of it as an element of how we build relationships and trust with children at that very early age.”

Both Archer and Dobson acknowledge that for most parents, sharing photos of their children is an innocent way of finding community and connection, and that social media can also be a creative outlet for kids.

“I think it’s really important that we can talk about caring for and nurturing children as they grow up without leaning too far into moral panic,” says Dobson.

She says parents should approach social media in a way that’s “focused on children’s rights, and really think about how they are supporting their emerging sense of agency, and how they conceive of the world.”

For most parents, sharing photos of their children is an innocent way of finding community, but it’s also important to consider consent, the child’s rights, and who might be watching.

What does the law say?

While there are clear laws on child labour in the traditional entertainment industry, because family influencers typically operate in the home, they occupy a bit of a grey area.

In Australia,“there is no real law around children working in the home as influencers”, says Archer.

Australia lags behind other countries in legislating the rights of child influencers. In 2020, France introduced a world-first law to regulate the production of content involving children for financial gain. The law also enshrined a child’s “right to be forgotten”, meaning social media platforms are obliged to erase any content involving the child at the request of the child.

Some US states have followed suit, including Illinois, which, in September 2023, became the first US state to pass a law protecting the financial interests of children involved in family vlogging. Last year, Minnesota added to these financial protections with a law banning children under 14 from appearing in more than 30 per cent of their parents’ social media content. California has passed similar laws.

While Australia recently passed a world-first social media ban for those under 16, it’s not yet clear what this means for parents sharing photos of children online, if anything.

A spokesperson from the eSafety commissioner added that social media companies play a role too: “The role of platforms cannot be overstated. eSafety believes the burden should never fall solely on the user; tech companies must take responsibility for the safety of their platforms and services.”

Their Safety by Design framework provides guidelines for ways in which online platforms can prioritise children’s safety and protection.

How to protect children online

In addition to policy and laws to protect child influencers, there are steps parents can take to protect their children and respect their agency.

• Be conscious of details in photos that might compromise privacy, like logos on school uniforms or location tags. Images can also contain less obvious details, such as where a photo was taken, in their metadata. Parents might want to consider hiding or obscuring children’s faces with emojis, particularly if they are too young to consent.
• Involve kids in the process: in addition to asking for consent to take and post content, Dobson says parents should involve children in the “storytelling” of the image, including captions, other images and videos that accompany the post, and how it’s shared.
• Consider the audience. “I have a private Instagram account with maybe 40 followers,” says Dobson. “So to post in that kind of forum versus posting to an audience of 400, 4000 or 400,000, that’s quite different in scope.”
• Adjust privacy settings to limit the audience to friends and family, and regularly review platforms’ privacy policies.
• Make sure everyone is on board: Archer recommends parents talk to one another, as well as friends and other family members, about their expectations regarding social media and photos of their children.
• For more tips and guidelines on photo consent, privacy settings, managing digital footprints, and the pressures of social media, visit the eSafety Commissioner.

Report online abuse and inappropriate behaviour to the Australian Centre To Counter Child Exploitation; Report online harm to the eSafety Commissioner; Support is available 24/7 at Kids Helpline and Lifeline

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.