During the 1920s, four-year-old Jackie Coogan was one of America’s favorite movie stars. When Coogan came of age after years of hard work in Hollywood, he learned he was penniless — his parents had run through the millions he earned. Soon afterward, California became the first state to regulate child actors’ welfare, requiring parents to create Coogan trusts that save a portion of the child’s acting income for adulthood.
Although 20th-century child actors faced tough conditions and uncertain futures, they were at least safe from cameras in their own homes. For thousands of young performers, that is no longer true. It was not until 2024 that California’s Coogan laws expanded to cover children who appear on social media, one year after Illinois expanded its own laws. Illinois became the first state to require that child influencers be compensated and allowed them to sue parents who fail to set aside their share of earnings in trust.
American state lawmakers are finally addressing children’s digital footprints and interactions with social media, taking cues from the laws of other nations. As a result, children and young adults may indeed have the right to sue their parents or even social media providers like Meta, depending on where they live and the exact legal remedies they seek.
Children on Social Media: Their Privacy and Their Parents
The United States is playing catch-up with the European Union in some respects, as its laws fundamentally differ on expression, privacy, and children’s rights. Countries in the EU have recognized the “right to be forgotten,” enshrined in the GDPR regulations that govern European internet privacy. Under the GDPR, a child who no longer wants their social media content online has a right to demand its removal. However, outside of certain legal and medical matters, U.S. state laws have not widely recognized children’s rights to privacy — at least, not as separate from their own parents’ wishes.
In 2023, the appalling case of family vlogger Ruby Franke drew wide attention to child abusers’ ability to hide in plain sight online. For the past few years, several states have used concepts from the right to be forgotten in creating privacy laws for children who have appeared in social media content.
In Utah, adults who were featured as minors in monetized social media content can, at 18, require the content creator to delete or edit that content under state law. Minnesota law now places guardrails on children’s participation in monetized social media content, requires Coogan‑style trusts or other compensation for eligible child content creators, and gives them a cause of action if a creator fails to honor statutory duties, including deletion requests. California’s bill, which is not yet law but strongly supported by both parties, will also allow a former child influencer to sue a family member who fails to take down their childhood content on request.
When the Posts Are Lawful but the Audience Is Not
(Content warning for sexual abuse and/or language in linked news stories)
Protecting children’s privacy online is not just an abstract matter of legal consent, or even of compensation. It can prevent grave dangers, especially in the age of generative AI. According to a widely cited report in France’s Fondation pour L’Enfance, up to half of the CSAM images found on pedophile image-sharing sites originated in parents’ social media posts of children. Worse yet, investigative reporters have exposed an underbelly of child influencer social media accounts run by parents for adult audiences, with disturbing “modeling” by girls as young as three.
Sadly, bad intentions pose a risk to any child who appears online, no matter what the content is or who posts it. The fear of sexual exploitation takes the most headlines, but young people online face more dangers than that, such as being targeted for extortion, identity fraud, and property crimes. Children with an established internet presence must also handle bullying from peers and long-term psychological distress from mismatches between their digital identities and their developing selves.
Who can protect a child from online overexposure if their parents do not? In France, a court can intervene, but in the U.S., the law varies by state. As law professor Stacey Barell Steinberg writes, a child outside the states with regulations may have few options to make the posting stop. In her article, a hypothetical child Instagram model confides in her teacher about the “intimate” photos she has to pose for. Her teacher sends the photos to the state abuse registry, but the counselor will not even take a report — legally, they say, it is simply not child abuse.
If a parent’s post caused actual injury, a child influencer might be able to bring a lawsuit for damages in state court. However, without a specific new law or case in the state, their success would be uncertain. Under federal law, a child has the right to sue a criminal who created CSAM with their image, or to obtain assistance fund payments, but only after years of legal proceedings. And as a practical matter, a minor or new adult would need outside support and resources for any legal efforts.
Children’s rights remain in flux in the United States, but society’s broad concern over social media’s effect on children may eventually help children’s privacy rights develop in the law. Although that concern may devolve into moral panic, as with emerging awareness of child abuse in the 1980s, states take a step towards real protection when they pass laws that grant child social media stars rights as entertainers and as human beings.
