Imagine being a five year old and being forced to film an unboxing vid whenever you got a toy in the mail.

Imagine becoming popular online at 6 and the toys start coming in the mail so fast you can’t even play with them, there is always more unboxing to do.

Imagine being 14, and everytime you tripped, sneezed, misspoke, cried was documented and shared across a dozen networks.

Some child influencers are born to “momfluencers”, inheriting large followings before they have learned to walk. The LaBrants, a family based in Tennessee, have accumulated millions of followers documenting their lives online. They run Instagram accounts for each of their children; their youngest, aged one and four, already have 1.4m followers on a joint profile

You know, we’re just now reaching the point where there are adults who’ve had their entire lives documented on social media without their consent by well meaning parents and I think that in and of itself has always been a selfish and irresponsible thing to do. But this is a whole different level of crazy. I can’t begin to imagine the amount of greed motivating these people to rob their own children of their privacy and force them into some “kidfluencer” role before they can even talk. Those “momfluencers” may be getting wealthy from all this but they’re morally bankrupt.

We can thank that piece of shit Reagan for originally loosening the rules that involved marketing to kids back in the 80s.

It’s been downhill ever since. Nowadays kids doing the influencing by marketing to other kids is the ultimate move for greedy corporations. We need to rein in the amount of marketing we do to kids.

Good this is shit we don’t need

Are there any devil’s advocate arguments in favor or non-harmful benefits of a parental- supervised, version of this, though? Not expecting much.

I’m just as honestly ignorant about this crap as most of the other folks here, but genuinely curious, so I don’t just go with my knee jerk reaction (ban this shit, it’s harmful for society) without considering facts of which I’m unaware.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

One of the most toxic “businesses” in existence. Completely based on exploitation, even more so than normal commercials and TV shows ever have done.