Scholar proposes a legal framework to safeguard child content creators’ social media earnings.
Twelve-year-old influencer Ryan Kaji makes $30 million a year on YouTube, but he does not have a legal right to that money. Two people in his life, however, can do whatever they want with his earnings: Ryan’s mom and dad.
In an article published in the Lincoln Memorial University Law Review, Deanna Cooper argues that lawmakers should require parents of young content creators to set aside some of their child’s earnings for the child’s future use. Cooper urges policymakers to look to existing laws that protect child actors’ income as an example of how to regulate child content creators’ income.
Youth who post content on social media platforms to promote products and brands to large audiences are colloquially referred to as “kid influencers” or even sometimes “kidfluencers.” Kid influencers can fall prey to companies that want the children to sell their products and to parents who exploit them for profit, Cooper asserts. No law currently sets parameters around the child’s relationship to advertisers or safeguards revenue children receive from social media.
Although the Federal Trade Commission released guidelines on endorsements and testimonials, which impact social media influencers, Cooper argues that this guidance minimally protects influencers. Importantly, there are no laws that limit how much work an influencer can do for brands yearly or that limit earnings from marketing, Cooper emphasizes. And unlike child actors, kid influencers typically do not have contractual commitments, so kid influencers may constantly churn out content for the many brands with which they partner with no legal protections, Cooper explains.
Cooper urges lawmakers to regulate the access that kid influencers have to their own earnings for their future use. She uses existing laws that protect child actors as an example to argue for similar protections for kid influencers.
For example, California enacted the California Child Actors Bill, also called the “Coogan Law,” after a successful child actor, Jackie Coogan, sued his parents for Jackie’s loss in access to his income. Jackie’s mother and step-father spent his earnings from acting before he reached adulthood.
The Coogan Law stipulates that a child entertainer’s earnings legally belong to the child and not to the parents. The Coogan Law also mandates that 15 percent of the child’s earnings be put into a trust fund or savings account. When drafting the law, legislators accounted for the fact that children cannot manage their own finances by creating a fiduciary duty between the parents and the minor.
Cooper proposes that all states create legislation similar to the Coogan Law to safeguard at least a portion of kid influencers’ earnings. Cooper suggests the laws maintain a similar framework to the Coogan Law by establishing that kid influencers’ earnings are legally their own and mandating that a percentage of such earnings be saved for their future use.
Cooper argues that it is especially important for legislators to protect kid influencers’ earnings because their earnings have the potential to be much higher than those of child actors. A kid influencer can make millions of dollars a year from brand partnerships, and their parents are currently not required to set aside any of their earnings for the child to have when they reach legal adulthood.
For example, Taytum and Oakley Fisher are the stars of the FishFam channel on YouTube, which earns the family up to $150,000 a month from brand deals. The Fisher parents admit that they treat their twins’ earnings as a familial income stream to provide for their family in the present rather than as the twins’ own money for future use. Cooper argues that without additional legal protections, children, such as Taytum and Oakley, are at risk of not having access to earnings from their labor when they reach legal adulthood.
Cooper concedes that difficulties exist in applying the Coogan Law to children working in social media. For example, unlike child actors who are employees of a studio, kid influencers do not have a formal contractual or employment relationship—a central feature of labor laws—with their parents. Furthermore, kid influencer parents often claim that their children are not working, but rather undertaking normal activities while being filmed.
Cooper contends that even though many kid influencers’ parents assert that they will never misuse their children’s income, the history of child actors, whose parents have mismanaged their earnings, suggests the need for precautionary legislation. Cooper urges that all states act to protect child content creator earnings to prevent a situation like the one Jackie Coogan was in.
