A mother posts her toddler’s first steps on Instagram. Children gather around the kitchen counter to help their father make sourdough bread in a YouTube video. On TikTok, a young gymnast performs a backflip atop a balance beam. These intimate snapshots of family life may look spontaneous and wholesome, but they are also often the raw material of a $30 billion (or more) influencer industry — one in which children’s lives are packaged, promoted, and monetized, often by their own parents. When does sharing family life online become child labor — and what protections do children have when it does? Through their work and scholarship, Leah Plunkett ’06 and Hilary Robinson ’06 have approached those questions from intersecting fields. They graduated from Harvard Law the year Facebook opened its doors to anyone age 13 or older and have spent much of the two decades since studying the legal and social consequences of life and work in the platform economy.
Plunkett, the Meyer Research Lecturer on Law and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, is a national leader in online legal education. Her scholarship examines digital privacy and the digital lives of children, families, and communities. She is the author of the book “Sharenthood” — which warns of the risks parents create when they share their children’s lives online — and currently serves as the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Child Digital Entertainers Act drafting committee.
Robinson, an associate professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University School of Law, served as the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation research project on the digital platform economy. Her doctoral research at MIT examined the “algorithmic labor market” through semi-randomly sampled ride-alongs with Uber drivers in Boston. At Northeastern, her research and teaching focus on the ways technology, labor, and law shape one another.
In a recent conversation with the Harvard Law Bulletin, Plunkett and Robinson discussed the legal protections — and significant gaps — that exist for child influencers today. They explored whether a child being paid to play with a toy on camera should be regulated like manual labor in a factory, the alarming parallels between influencer culture and the adult entertainment industry, the real-world harms that can result when images and video of children are posted online — either by themselves or by adults — and what policymakers can do today to better protect kids. Their conversation also surfaced a question that Plunkett and Robinson now hope to explore together: Does the platform economy upend one of contract law’s most basic assumptions? Traditionally, mutual assent precedes production. Online, however, people may create the product, generate its value, and expose themselves to its risks long before any contract — or meaningful consent — exists.
What are the real-world harms to kids who are monetized in content, whether they’re the star or just featured by a parent?
PLUNKETT: I’d point people to Alyson Stoner’s memoir, which describes what they call the “toddler-to-trainwreck pipeline” — their own experience as a former Hollywood child star, and how the influencer industry is putting more kids in that pipeline.
Developmentally, a child or teen has real limits on understanding, let alone meaningfully consenting to, being put on a global stage in perpetuity in their own most intimate spaces — their home and daily life. That has a lot of harms and risks, including: an erosion of sense of self and autonomy and agency; real boundary violations from viewers who feel they know the child personally and will try to engage with them directly; and outright financial exploitation or abuse where a parent is making a lot of money off of them. They can come of age and realize they were put to work without their consent and perhaps even their knowledge, and have literally nothing to show for it, which then carries its own psychological, emotional, and relational harm. There are also practical limitations for kids who arrive at adulthood and realize they spent their childhood working online and now don’t have the peer networks, interests, or preparation for college or a first job that their peers have. That’s all to say nothing of the harms and risks they may experience while making the content.
I want to be clear — I don’t think every instance of a child appearing in family content should be banned. Even if an outright ban were constitutional, enactable, and feasible, I would not support it, but the harms and risks are very real.
ROBINSON: We decided in the 20th century that children shouldn’t work, even when a child’s labor could bring real value back to a family. Childhood and school should sit outside the market economy.
The deeper issue is that children don’t have full autonomy — they are dependent on the adults around them. The problem of children in workplaces is similar to the problem of enslaved people. The exchange can never be fair because your body is manipulable by someone who is in a position of power over you, and that gets translated into a labor system. In a system that’s trying to produce value, we just can’t trust that the effort made by individuals with vulnerabilities wouldn’t be extracted as a form of deeply alienating and damaging power.
And platforms have no built-in reason to care what’s driving engagement or what harm results from it. They don’t care about negative effects because they profit from the engagement. The highest-earning creator on YouTube for years was a child who unboxed toys — meaning YouTube made the most money in its history off a child’s labor. Until the law specifically carves out certain kinds of engagement, there’s no incentive for the platform. The incentive is the opposite.
Related to that, the same legal dynamics that make it hard to regulate family influencer content also explain a much darker pattern — remote, decentralized control over people who can’t leave a physical location and are compelled to produce content for profit, as in the recent allegations of human trafficking against Andrew and Tristan Tate. It’s the same underlying structure: bodies contained in private space, linked to a profitable distribution system by pocket computing, with the platform again removed from responsibility. It shows how easily this kind of remote, aggregated production model outpaces existing law, because no single actor wants to admit they’re running a productive system that needs oversight.
What legal protections exist today for minors in the influencer and family content space, and where are the biggest gaps?
ROBINSON: Regulating the platform economy continues to be one of the most challenging parts of law today, and children who are functionally working online are the clearest example of why. It’s the digital-era version of child labor in early industrial capitalism. It’s obviously wrong intuitively, but extremely challenging to regulate, because, unlike a mine or a factory floor, the “workplace” is hidden inside something we think of as private: the home. The digital economy has collapsed the boundary between private life and public production in a way that doesn’t match how we’ve thought about work for the last century. It looks a lot more like the pre-industrial period, when labor and leisure were tangled together in the same household.
“Regulating the platform economy continues to be one of the most challenging parts of law today, and children who are functionally working online are the clearest example of why.”
Hilary Robinson
Today’s moment layers the private home and leisurely activities, like pictures of your children enjoying vacation, over something that is much more like the production of entertainment. That challenges the legal regulatory categories that grew over the last century — the century in which we regulated work.
Our regulatory categories were built for a very different economy — one where work was tied to identifiable corporate entities and physical spaces that agencies like OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] could actually walk into. The platform economy resists that kind of sorting. We don’t even have stable vocabulary for it. “Influencer,” “kidfluencer,” “content” — these are all new terms invented to paper over the fact that we can’t cleanly separate production from consumption, or even creator from consumer.
You can see legislatures straining against that problem in a law like Illinois Senate Bill 1782, one of the more comprehensive attempts to protect the financial earnings of child influencers and vloggers. It applies when at least 30% of an account’s compensated content in a 30-day period features a minor, and when that content clears a platform’s monetization threshold, or earns at least 10 cents per view. Once these thresholds are triggered, the adult posting the content has to track how much time the minor appears on camera and deposit a proportional share of the earnings into a trust. If they don’t, the minor gets a civil right of action once they’re an adult.
It’s essentially a rehash of California’s Coogan Law [a piece of legislation, enacted in 1939, that requires employers to set aside 15% of a minor’s gross earnings from the entertainment industry into a blocked trust account], but it’s unlikely to produce the result the legislators want, which is fewer children working online. The Coogan Law worked because Hollywood production was visible and public — a studio, a set, a payroll, and a broadly consumed product. The new laws rely on the very people creating the harm — the parents — to track and report themselves, and then rely on the child to sue after the fact. They target the effects of the system, not the production apparatus that’s causing them.
PLUNKETT: I agree it’s an extraordinarily hard thing to regulate well — constitutionally, ethically, and practically. I’ve spent the last year and a half as reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Child Digital Entertainers Act drafting committee, so I’ve lived inside these exact questions: the financial rights of child digital entertainers, intellectual property rights, privacy rights, workplace health and safety rights, and some that Hilary identified, such as what do we call this industry, what falls inside its boundaries, and how do we separate “family life” from “work” as a matter of statute and enforcement?
Think about the difference from a film set. If we’d gone to a movie theater in the 1990s — great decade, I might add — to watch “Home Alone,” the production had a clear beginning and end. Figuring out what a child was contracted to do, and for how long, was straightforward. None of that is true with content featuring children online. What’s actually captured and circulated by a parent, and under what terms, and the boundaries of what is fair, reasonable, and defensible, are all genuinely hard to define.
While federal reform on kids’ online privacy and safety has proved almost impossible and the work is far from finished, there have still been some legislative success stories. States have moved faster, and a lot of that momentum traces back to youth activists — like Chris McCarty in Washington state and Shreya Nallamothu in Illinois, both of whom started this work as teenagers doing Girl Scout projects. They noticed peers making money online and asked their state legislators a simple question: Is any of that money reaching the kids? Their advocacy did more to move state legislatures than that of any other group of stakeholders and really got the ball rolling, so I’m optimistic.
“The new laws rely on the very people creating the harm — the parents — to track and report themselves, and then rely on the child to sue after the fact.”
Hilary Robinson
Does any of the state legislation distinguish between types of child content — a toy review versus a dance video versus content that displaces school and childhood?
PLUNKETT: Not at that level of precision, no. Some states focus specifically on video, which leaves open whether other formats — photos, text posts, podcasts — are covered at all. I don’t think we’ll see laws that pay people differently based on the topic of the content itself; that runs into First Amendment problems fast. If a state said you get paid more for dancing than for cooking, it would be regulating speech based on subject matter, which raises real constitutional issues for both the person on camera and the platform.
But the format question — video only, versus every venue a child might appear on: photos, audio, text, and increasingly AI-generated content trained on a child’s likeness — is genuinely unsettled. Roughly 10% of states have passed laws, and another quarter or so have seriously taken up a bill, and this is still an open question across most of them. I think covering every format is both the more ethical approach and the one more likely to survive an equal-protection challenge down the road — you don’t want a kid who only appeared in still photos arguing the law protected video kids but not them.
ROBINSON: That loops back to something I think about as a contracts professor. In classic contract law, mutual assent precedes production — you agree to terms, then the work happens. The platform economy flips that: You consent to a sprawling terms-ofservice agreement up front, and then all sorts of unrelated production and consumption happen under its umbrella. Parents can consent to that; children obviously can’t. So, we’re left trying to measure compensation based on the product after the fact, which is really a form of piecework — paid by the item, the way pre-industrial home labor systems worked, where a middleman farmed out sewing to individual households. There’s no upfront contract negotiation, no wage, no salary, no vertically integrated employer as there would be in any other entertainment context.
But we see triangulation throughout the whole thing. The platform sits in the middle, profiting off user engagement with content it didn’t produce and isn’t paying for directly, while also brokering separate deals with advertisers. The platforms are capturing value from what kids are producing.
PLUNKETT: Right. Most of the laws I have seen don’t attempt to have the platforms engage directly in compensation, which is different from the setup that the Coogan Law contemplates.
In the analogy to the Coogan Law, an online platform is like a production studio and the minors appearing online are like actors. How does the Coogan Law comparison hold up, and where does it break down?
PLUNKETT: The Coogan Law was written for Hollywood as a sector, not for a family business. It assumed a structure where the parent managing a child’s career wasn’t also the studio making the content and collecting the money. In the platform economy, that’s almost always the same person. Most of today’s state laws treat compensation as a matter between the adult content creator (usually the parent) and the minor. They don’t require platforms, which are providing compensation in terms of monetized views, to pay any of it directly to the child or set it aside for them.
ROBINSON: Right, and the party best positioned to track this — who’s appearing, how often, how much money is attached to it — is the platform, because it predominantly controls the means of production, to use old language. But platforms have been very effective at legally distancing themselves from that role.
Uber has argued in case after case that it’s not a transportation company, just a two-sided market for information exchange to match riders and drivers — which lets it skirt the obligations that would come with admitting it runs a productive system. Platforms can make a similar claim: They’re just hosting content, even though they already do things like identify and remove child sexual abuse material, which shows they’re fully capable of identifying child-featured content when it serves their interests.
“If I had a magic wand, I’d have every state pass a labor law protecting the financial, privacy, and workplace-condition rights of kids and teens working in the digital entertainment and influencer industry.”
Leah Plunkett
If you could pass one piece of legal reform right now, what would it be — and why would it move the needle more than what’s currently on the books?
ROBINSON: I’d require platforms to identify child-featured accounts and report basic metrics — hours of a minor’s appearance, revenue attached to that content — to a state regulator on an audit basis. It isn’t a technical stretch: Uber can already calculate and pay out drivers by the trip. Platforms resist this because it exposes the algorithmic mechanics of their business to outside scrutiny. When Massachusetts wrote its first ride-share legislation, the original bill gave a state auditor direct access to driver profiles.
After lobbying from Uber and Lyft, that became a self-issued certificate subject only to occasional audit. I expect the same resistance here. But we’d never accept the argument that factory conditions are too proprietary for OSHA to inspect, and platforms shouldn’t get that pass either. You can’t structure a business to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere and then claim it’s unregulable.
PLUNKETT: If I had a magic wand, I’d have every state — not the federal government — pass a constitutional, ethical, and practical labor law protecting the financial, privacy, and workplace-condition rights of kids and teens working in the digital entertainment and influencer industry. I’d keep it at the state level deliberately, so the lawmakers, regulators, and enforcement mechanisms closest to the actual families involved are the ones building and running it.
“When a parent has reason to know the audience skews toward exploitation, we’re well past questions of contract or financial risk and into a real safety crisis.”
Leah Plunkett
Is there anything that we haven’t touched on?
PLUNKETT: I’d add one more piece that’s uncomfortable but important: There’s real overlap between parts of the child digital entertainment/influencer sector and adult entertainment or close-to-pornography sector. I don’t want to be the morality police, but consider, for instance, a parent posting gymnastics or dance content of a child in limited clothing, knowing or having reason to know a meaningful share of the viewership isn’t coaches or peers but adults with predatory intent. I’m not suggesting kids shouldn’t appear in ordinary athletic content in public settings — that would be absurd. But when a parent has reason to know the audience skews toward exploitation, we’re well past questions of contract or financial risk and into a real safety crisis.
It’s worth remembering that child abuse and neglect statutes still apply regardless of whether the harm happens online or in person; posting content doesn’t create legal cover.
ROBINSON: Just that this dynamic — remote control over people whose labor happens somewhere a platform can plausibly deny responsibility for — isn’t limited to family content. It’s the same structural gap that makes a wide range of platform-enabled harms hard to reach with existing law. Kids who work as influencers are the clearest case, but they’re not the only ones exposed by it.
