#sharenting

“You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” 

In this week’s episode of The Netmums Podcast, Gemma Styles opens up about setting digital boundaries as a parent – and why she’s choosing to share less, not more, when it comes to her daughter.

From online privacy to future-proofing her child’s digital footprint, Gemma shares a thoughtful perspective shaped by over a decade on social media.

"PARENTS STOP EXPOSE YOUR CHILDREN ONLINE"

"PARENTS STOP TO USE YOUR CHILDREN TO EARN MONEY"

"PARENTS STOP TO OVEREXPLOIT YOUR KIDS TO CREATE CONTENT"

A mother shared a birthday post for her daughter titled "My baby turned 12 Today" featuring four photos of the child. The post quickly went viral, gaining over 4.6 million views, thousands of likes and more than a thousand bookmarks.

Almost immediately, the post was flooded with, quote-tweeted by and circulated among predators and explicit accounts. Yet, despite being handed undeniable proof of what was happening, the mother flatly refused to delete the images, choosing instead to pick fights with anyone trying to warn her.

This situation needs to be talked about extensively because the defenses this mother is using are the exact same logical fallacies that put millions of children at risk every day. Here is a teardown of her claims and a look into the dark reality of how online predators actually operate.

Part 1: Deconstructing the Mother’s Defenses

When called out by thousands of concerned users, the mother doubled down, using a series of deflections to protect her ego rather than her child. Let’s look at exactly what she said and why her logic is broken.

1. The "Fully Clothed" Fallacy

she defends herself by saying:

She is completely right that the outfit isn't the problem and anyone who says the girl wasn’t dress appropriately is WRONG. But she is entirely wrong about what that means. Predators do not care if a child is wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

An account named JADEN quote-tweeted the innocent photos with the caption, "the things i'll do 😳😳😳".

An even more horrific and explicit comment from an account named slime reads, "I’d still fuck her lil pussy".

There are so many other comments and quotes like this.

To an online predator, a completely normal, innocent photo of a child is easily weaponised and sexualised. They do not need explicit imagery to project their sickness onto a minor. Believing that a child is safe from exploitation simply because they are "fully covered" is a dangerous level of naivety.

2. The Weaponisation of the "Bookmark" Feature

When users pointed out that the post had nearly a thousand bookmarks from suspicious accounts, she reacted defensively:

While normal people use bookmarks for "outfit inspo," predators use them as a digital indexing system. On Twitter/X, bookmarks are private. A user cannot see who bookmarked their post. Because of this privacy, predators heavily rely on the bookmark button to build private, easily accessible folders of targeted children without drawing the public attention that a "Like" or a "Retweet" would, similar to how predators act on Pinterest. A sudden explosion of hundreds or thousands of private bookmarks on a casual photo of a child is one of the most prominent red flags of digital pooling.

3. "Safe in Real Life" vs. The Digital Footprint

She claims victory by stating:

This is perhaps the most broken logic of all. A child is not "safe in real life" if their face, age, location cues, and body are currently being distributed across pedophilic networks and adult content pages online.

Once an image is posted publicly, it can be downloaded instantly.

It can be fed into facial recognition software, cross-referenced with other platforms, or saved onto the hard drives of thousands of creeps.

The physical door to her house might be locked, but she has left the digital window wide open, allowing anonymous people to build a file on her 12-year-old daughter. And if she opens up a social media account those predators are counting on her mothers account to reveal it or they’ll just find themselves

Part 2: How Online Predators Actively Operate

To understand why the users reacted with such urgency, you have to understand the mechanics of how digital child exploitation works on open platforms like Twitter/X.

The Scent of Vulnerability: Predators look for algorithmic openings. When a post of a young child starts gaining traction, it gets picked up by the platform's recommendation engines. It enters a "circulation loop" where predatory accounts actively tag each other, quote-tweet the post to signal-boost it to their networks, and bookmark it for offline saving.

The Role of "Porn Pages": As the poster noted, these images are frequently scraped by automated bots or manual users running adult accounts to be reposted into explicit communities, driving traffic and sexualizing the child across entirely different sectors of the web.

Exploiting Parental Inaction: Predators thrive when a parent is inactive or combative. When a mother openly states, "I'm not deleting SHIT!", she gives them a green light. They know the content isn't going anywhere, giving them all the time they need to archive and distribute it.

Part 3: The Danger of Parental Ego

Perhaps the most tragic part of this entire situation is how the mother chose to spend her energy. Instead of looking at the horrific things being said about her 12-year-old and quietly hitting the delete button,she is deflecting. Instead of acknowledging the ongoing exploitation, the mother completely deflected the safety concern to issue violent, real-life threats:

Bitch yall take this internet shit too far. Wya??? I’m in Atlanta TODAY and forever. Find you a funeral home though first hoe... I'll find YOU!"

She became so hyper-focused on "not letting the internet bully her" and proving that she was a "tough mother" who wouldn't back down, that she completely lost sight of the actual victim: her daughter. She chose to fight strangers in the comments to protect her pride, while letting the literal predators in her quote-tweets run completely rampant.

Conclusion

This isn't about "shaming a mother for being proud of her kid." You can be proud of your child in private group chats, on locked accounts, on your private facebook or in real life.

This is about recognizing that the internet is a deeply dangerous place for minors. When a parent is handed explicit, terrifying evidence that their child is being digitally targeted and their response is to throw a temper tantrum, threaten violence, and leave the photos up out of pure stubbornness, they are failing their primary duty of care.

Si de algo va a servir esta situación de "invasión" de la IA es para que hagamos carne el impacto de la huella informática.

Lo que sistemas como Chatgpt toman de la red es información publicada, que a diferencia de la información pública no es de interés público pero no es ilegal leer, reproducir o comercializar porque ha sido expuesta por el propio dueño.

Reddit, AO3, blogs, libros publicados, algunas redes sociales, etc, no son legalmente información sensible ni confidencial, y deja de ser "nuestra" desde el momento que se postea. Por eso Chatgpt puede barrerlos para diagramar sus respuestas. No así los datos personales del autor, porque eso entra dentro de la confidencialidad.

Pero chicos, quienes publicamos nuestro material somos nosotros y estamos informados y consentimos a que cada foto, cada fic, cada post, puede llegar a los confines del internet de cualquier manera.

Esto no es una apología a la IA, sólo quiero que se cuiden. Y de paso que las abuelas dejen de subir fotos de sus nietitos con el uniforme de la escuela a la que van, pero bue.

Yesterday, an Anon @bat-cat-reader got made me think. Long and hard, far and wide - research included.

Here is the Anon: https://www.tumblr.com/bat-cat-reader/750859423333908480/lo-bueno-de-estar-revisando-redes-constantemente?source=share . I wanted to piggyback first, then I realized the issue was way more important than the person in question. And decided to post everything separately.

Loved this very matter of fact, calm Anon and I totally agree with what was said about overexposing a child online.

This sudden surge of completely inappropriate information about that child raised an eyebrow, and then some more. It begs, as always when dealing with minors, the question of privacy, as opposed to using their image for what obviously is self-promotion. And more generally, what is called 'sharenting', a portmanteau combining 'sharing' (info) and 'parenting' that was quite recently invented by The Wall Street Journal to describe a more and more widespread phenomenon.

That some parents would just love to have and even share digital mementoes of their child(ren) is apparently ok. Others, however, choose to monetize their kids, turning them into a sales argument. I am still floored at such disingenuous choices, that might have serious consequences for their future. And I am not the only one, mind you: a 2018 report by England's Children Commissioner, the leading government official competent for protecting and promoting children's rights, found out that parental digital oversharing is a high risk behavior for the child.

Short term, as in identity theft ...

... to long term, as in lost academic or professional opportunities - the 2018 warning made only more compelling by the recent AI craze:

[Source: England's Children Commissioner Report 'Who Knows What About Me?', 2018 - online: https://assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2018/11/cco-who-knows-what-about-me.pdf]

You'll find this very recent article from The Guardian absolutely enlightening, too. I certainly did: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/26/son-social-media-parents-children

Particularly this - I am not a mom, so Mordor bitches will certainly point this salient detail out, you see. But maybe this journalist mom's POV could give them (and maybe even other people) pause:

Pedophile. Quite chilling, right? Pedophile rings actively searching for children photos inadvertently being shared online, to feed sick obsessions worldwide (do not be parochial and think those pics must be of an ambiguous nature!). Instagram being currently in very hot water for its strange content promoting algorithm, allowing pedophiles to easily access children photos and personal data, based on exif. Digital kidnapping, as in criminals pretending to be the child's parents, for various financial or pathological reasons.

Think I am a stupid, stupid shipper with an agenda? Then so is the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Commission. Last year, a joint statement has been released by two if its members (and before Mordor starts screeching about 'the MAGA mommies obsession for pedophilia', let it be said it is a bipartisan, Democrat and Republican initiative), about the fact that 'Instagram hosts a vast network of pedophilic content and that its algorithms are actively driving users to this content':

[Source: https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/pallone-rodgers-demand-answers-from-instagram-after-reports-the-platform-is-driving-users-to-child-sex-abuse-material]

It followed a long report on Instagram's less than responsible practices in the matter, published by The Wall Street Journal, not your next door digital gossip rag (subscribers only, but you'll have an idea: https://www.wsj.com/articles/instagram-vast-pedophile-network-4ab7189?st=mbga8lpdddfm5dh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink)

Mark this statement: 'It is clear these companies cannot be trusted to protect children on their platforms'. I, not even a mom (but an aunt, a friend and a godmother, too), cannot even start to express my disgust at the hypocrisy of barely hiding children's faces on a certain blog, but at the same time allowing rabid speculation about a child's whereabouts, based on what is clearly a case of sharenting. All the mothers, grandmothers and aunts commenting under that post would have to take a long, hard look at themselves in a mirror. And also ask themselves why they allowed their personal fantasy to get an upper hand on common sense?

That is a terrible, terrible shame. And then people wonder why is C not sharing anything? Would you share your kid(s) to that mob? I wouldn't and it is my strong belief no mother in her right mind would.

Last but not least, reckless digital behavior comes with risks, costs and consequences. Including legal ones, taking into account what very probably is some loose, rather informal agreement of co-parenting (as opposed to a stricter, 50/50 shared custody system), as per Scottish family law. Something I shall briefly try to explain, for context purposes only:

Unlike many other legal systems in the world, the 1995 Scottish Children Act has a slightly different approach to custody (or what they call 'residence'), in which the child's best interest, as well as the parents' own agreement (called a Parenting Plan) are paramount. By the same token, it does not matter if the parents were married or just common law partners, for example. This allows for less cumbersome living and financial arrangements, provided the two parties agree, and also for quicker procedures, as the law does not encourage parents to go to Court, if an agreement has been reached ('no-order principle'). Mediation and legal assistance services are readily available to make every particular case fit in the local Parenting Plan framework. On the other hand, because in legal matters all things are (must be, really) symmetrical, it is relatively easy to have parental rights and responsibilities enforced (example: issue an order stipulating to cease and desist from posting on Instagram), or even removed, in Court. While removal is a bit of a hassle (supporting statements are required, either from an independent witness/not a relative or Social Welfare Services), the enforcement is way easier and just requires a basic contradictory procedure in Court.

For example, a child's proven overexposure on the Internet can very well be successfully contended in Court, if things go South. Especially in an emotionally loaded local context:

[Source: https://news.sky.com/story/seven-members-of-paedophile-gang-guilty-of-running-monstrous-child-sex-abuse-ring-13008082 - you read the article if you want, it's brutal]

I am not saying this will happen. What I am trying to say is simply that nobody (and I repeat: nobody) should play with fire, like this. Neither the parent, nor the public. This is a plea for decency across the dashboard I strongly felt I should make, if others won't.

El "sharenting" se refiere a la práctica de compartir información y contenido relacionado con los hijos en las redes sociales y plataformas digitales. La privacidad digital de los niños en este contexto es un tema importante, ya que implica la protección de su información personal y su derecho a la privacidad.

Contexto:

El "sharenting" se refiere a la práctica cada vez más común de los padres de compartir información, fotos y videos de sus hijos en las redes sociales. Este fenómeno plantea una serie de desafíos en torno a la privacidad digital de los niños y adolescentes. Por un lado, el "sharenting" pone en juego los derechos digitales de los menores, como su privacidad y su identidad digital. Esto se debe a que los padres comparten contenido sobre sus hijos sin su consentimiento, lo cual puede tener consecuencias a largo plazo para el desarrollo y la autonomía de los niños.

En la era digital, la protección de la privacidad de los menores de edad se enfrenta a una serie de riesgos derivados del "sharenting". La exposición de información personal, la pérdida de control sobre su imagen y la vulneración de su derecho a la intimidad son algunas de las principales amenazas que enfrentan los niños y adolescentes. Además, el "sharenting" implica una quiebra de la privacidad y la identidad digital de los menores, ya que los padres comparten contenido sobre ellos sin su consentimiento. Esto pone en riesgo el ejercicio de sus derechos civiles y libertades, como el derecho a la privacidad.

Leyes promulgadas:

En el Perú, respecto a la protección de datos personales desde el 3 de julio 2011, se promulgó la ley N° 29733 (Peruano, 2011), mediante la cual da complemento al artículo 2 numeral 6 de la Constitución Política del Perú. De dicha disposición cabe resaltar la importancia del cuidado con los datos personales, así como los Principios rectores, como son el de seguridad y protección adecuada, con la finalidad de su resguardo a fin de evitar el uso inadecuado de los mismos; precisando que estos datos deben ser manejados en base a la regulación vigente local y de los organismos internacionales en la materia. En cuyo caso se debe dictar medidas especiales para el tratamiento de los datos personales, protegiendo y garantizando sus derechos, en atención al interés superior de los niños y de los adolescentes. Posteriormente, el 22 de octubre del 2013 (Peruano D. O., 2013) en la Ley N°30096 de Delitos Informáticos en su artículo 5 se enuncia la defensa de los niños, niñas y adolescentes con fines sexuales por medios tecnológicos. Así como las acciones en conjunto con otros países con el fin de generar medidas concretas a fin de salvaguardar las buenas prácticas de estos medios informativos y de comunicación. Esta norma, enuncia que el uso de los datos el consentimiento, debe ser otorgado de manera libre, previo, expreso e informado. Son los padres quienes deciden o no brindar el consentimiento para el tratamiento o uso de los datos de sus hijos e hijas en su representación. Sin embargo, en el Reglamento de la presente LPDP, permite de manera excepcional que los adolescentes comprendidos entre los 14 y los 18 años pueden conceder el consentimiento para la utilización de sus datos, bajo la premisa que la información sea brindada en un lenguaje comprensible por ellos y no sea necesaria la asistencia de quienes acreditan la patria potestad para ser aceptada. Tales como creación de cuentas en redes sociales, jugar por internet o compras en internet de productos permitidos.

Recomendaciones :

Concienciar a los padres: Es importante educar a los padres sobre los riesgos y las implicaciones del "sharenting" para la privacidad y el desarrollo de los niños. Esto puede hacerse a través de campañas de sensibilización, talleres y recursos informativos.

Promover el consentimiento de los menores: Involucrar a los niños y adolescentes en la decisión de compartir contenido sobre ellos en línea. Respetar su derecho a decidir qué información se publica y obtener su aprobación antes de hacerlo.

Establecer pautas y políticas: Desarrollar directrices y políticas claras a nivel familiar, escolar y comunitario sobre el uso responsable de las redes sociales y el manejo de la información de los menores.

Fortalecer la regulación: Impulsar el desarrollo de leyes y normativas que protejan específicamente los derechos digitales de los niños, incluyendo su privacidad, imagen e identidad en línea.

Promover la alfabetización digital: Enseñar a niños y adolescentes habilidades para gestionar su presencia y privacidad en entornos digitales de manera segura y responsable.

Ofrecer herramientas de control: Proporcionar a los padres y menores opciones para monitorear, limitar y eliminar el contenido publicado sobre ellos en línea.

Fomentar el diálogo intergeneracional: Facilitar espacios de discusión y reflexión entre padres e hijos sobre el uso de las tecnologías y la protección de la privacidad digital.

La clave es adoptar un enfoque integral que involucre a todos los actores relevantes - padres, escuelas, legisladores y la sociedad en general - para garantizar la protección de los derechos digitales de los niños y adolescentes.

Conclusión:

El fenómeno del "sharenting" plantea importantes desafíos en torno a la privacidad digital de los niños y adolescentes. Si bien los padres pueden tener la intención de compartir momentos significativos de la vida de sus hijos, esta práctica conlleva riesgos que deben ser considerados cuidadosamente. La exposición excesiva de información personal, imágenes y videos de menores en redes sociales y plataformas en línea puede tener consecuencias negativas para su desarrollo, seguridad y autonomía. Además, el "sharenting" puede generar problemas de identidad, acoso cibernético y la pérdida de control sobre la propia narrativa digital de los niños a medida que crecen.

Para abordar esta problemática, se requiere un enfoque integral que involucre a todos los actores relevantes: padres, educadores, legisladores y la sociedad en general. Es fundamental promover la conciencia sobre los riesgos del "sharenting", fomentar el consentimiento de los menores, establecer pautas y políticas claras, fortalecer la regulación, desarrollar habilidades de alfabetización digital y facilitar el diálogo intergeneracional. Solo a través de esfuerzos coordinados y la adopción de medidas concretas podremos garantizar la protección de los derechos digitales de los niños y adolescentes, preservando su privacidad, seguridad y autonomía en el entorno en línea.

Referencias:

Somolinos, A. Z. (2022). El" sharenting", una cuestión de patria potestad (¿ y de protección de datos?). Revista Crítica de Derecho Inmobiliario, 98(793), 2769-2784.https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8665921

Romero Fernández, L. (2024). Exposición de menores en redes sociales: el fenómeno de las “Instamamis” y el “Sharenting” (Bachelor's thesis).https://rodin.uca.es/handle/10498/33473

Azurmendi, A., Etayo, C., & Torrell, A. (2021). Sharenting y derechos digitales de los niños y adolescentes. Profesional de la información, 30(4). https://revista.profesionaldelainformacion.com/index.php/EPI/article/view/85823