It wasn’t my finest hour. ‘I’d like you to stop sharing pictures of our daughter online,’ my partner said. ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ I replied. Followed by ‘she’s my daughter too.’
It’s probably the one and only time I will ever feel a kinship with Chiara Ferragni, the Italian mega-influencer with 29m followers, whose (reportedly soon-to-be ex) husband Fedez has apparently read her a similar riot act.
The faces of their two kids have been conspicuously absent of late, which is odd given her history of sharing some of their most vulnerable moments. ‘Backs of their heads’ strategy: now full swing in the Ferragni empire, in what is a microcosmic echo of the ‘sharenting reckoning’ at large in the headlines.
Once I managed to grow up, I interrogated why I’d been such a brat about my fiance’s simple, reasonable request to stop sharing. My profile is open, not private, and I have nearly 80K followers, so it’s clear that my reach extends to potentially creepy strangers (upon further investigation, I discovered that sometimes photos of her reach 12K non-followers. Shiver).
On the flipside, the adolescent guilt-jerk was somewhat mystifying, since I’ve never been a prolific sharent, with shares still in the single digits, and I’ve never used my child for capital gain. Or - have I?
A-ha. Therein lay the reason for my adolescent over-reaction. I’d once crafted an ‘I’ve sold half a million books!’ post (humblebrag) and as I was composing the still life of all my books plus the flowers from my agent, I lowered my camera (phone) and said ‘this needs something.’
And so, in the manner of the 1980s photographer who enlists a model to recline on a car, I drafted in something - my one-year-old daughter - then performed her favourite jam (wheels on the bus) to make her laugh. There it is, I thought. The money shot.
If you share pictures of your kids too, it’s likely that your profile is private and that you know all of, if not most of, your followers. Please don’t see judgement here where there is none. My situation is very different given the scale and my entangled business interests.
Indeed, I quickly discovered how intoxicatingly addictive such sharenting can be, given I have never had higher engagement than when I shared her. My 'I had a baby’ * holds newborn aloft Lion King style * post received 10K+ likes and 674 comments; fivefold what I would normally get. Dopamine pin-balled through me_. Again, again,_ chanted the part of me desperate for likes, for views, for engagement.
But, the jig is up, for sharents like me. It’s time to reconsider, say lawmakers, startling studies and of course, the increasingly nefarious capabilities of dark AI and deepfakes, plus the higher dangers of identity theft and digital kidnapping.
The French anti-sharenting bill passed last year was stern, urging parents to take responsibility for the kids’ privacy, and awarding judges the right to ban influencers from posting their child’s image altogether. Legislators cited the hypocrisy that a child can’t even legally have a social media account until they’re 13, but by the time they reach that age, an average of 1300 images have already been shared of them.
The proposed Italian law is softer, saying that sharents need to place any profits made into a bank account for the kid once they turn 18. Only fair, right? It also suggests that 14 year-olds be given the right to ask for ‘digital oblivion’ in retrospect.
A noble notion, but once the photos are out there, they’re gone. Who knows where they’ve ended up. I’ve had to make my peace with the fact my daughter’s first 18 months are seeded in the digital hinterlands, no matter what I delete.
I don’t want to tell you the next part, but I must. A terrifying Australian study found that around half of paedophilic images online (they looked at 45 million) were sourced from social media. ‘Keep calm’, the anti-alarmist side of me says in response to this, pointing out that it’s enormously unlikely that a deviant will digitally prowl my particular toddler swaddled in sheepskin, whose eyes and mouth are the only body parts visible, over all the other pictures. The chance is miniscule - microscopic - amoebic even. But I’d still rather reduce that to zero.
Many of us remain in wilful ignorance about this because the truth is inconvenient. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know of the dangers’ sniffed some commenters, when I posted on Instagram about my intention to stop posting my child on Instagram (does a digital intention fall in the forest if you don’t post about it).
I’d seen the headlines, of course, but I was remaining deliberately ignorant because: I wanted to continue. Once I started learning about it, the option to continue shrank and shrank until it closed to me. I knew it would.
That’s how I am - that’s how most of us are - which is why we avoid knowing too much about the implications of say, meat-eating if we are too attached to chorizo. If we shine a light in our own eyes, we’ll find that our motives are essentially self-seeking. Are we really creating a ’digital photo-album for them to look at when they’re older’? Because if so, we both know there are more private ways to do that.
The ‘backs of their head’ strategy works I think, as long as you can answer the question ‘would I mind if..,’ with a clean conscience. Like, would I mind if someone shared a shot of the back of my head while I was eating, as with a picture of a breastfeeding baby? No, I wouldn’t. Would I mind if someone shared a pic of the back of my head while I ran through water sprinklers in a bikini, off my head on Skittles? Yes, I very much would.
But the scariest thing of all is AI. With it, we are a society tipped and held over a rollercoaster track that goes into an unknown black hole. If you’d told us ten years ago that a computer would be able to take fully clothed teenage girls and strip them convincingly naked (as has happened to 28 girls in one small Spanish town) we would have asked if you also believed Elvis is alive and well and living in Kent.
I always thought it was a bit wanky in the 00s when celeb parents started requesting that their kids' faces be pixelated on pap shots. 'Who cares, they're five?!' I said. Now I think those celebs were thought leaders. They’d chosen the public eye, they’d stepped into the spotlight, as have I, but their kids hadn't.
For us to crack on and not seek consent from kids is very 1980s of us. ‘Just sit down, shut up, look pretty, play nice, be good OK’ is totally outdated, except in this digital forum. I can’t help thinking that sharenting is the ‘20s version of smoking in the car with the window rolled down (it was 1986 before secondary smoke was publicly declared dangerous).
It’ll probably be OK, we tell ourselves, but what about if it isn’t? We don’t know what we don’t know yet.