Child influencers on social media platforms fall outside of the protection afforded by employment laws, a select committee of British MPs said.
The Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Committee has urged the government to bolster the advertising and employment laws to bring influencer culture into scope.
In a report published on May 9, the DCMS Committee stated that the rapid growth of influencer culture “exposed a number of regulatory gaps, particularly around advertising disclosure and protection for children, both as influencers and viewers.”
The committee said it heard concerns during its inquiry into influencer culture that some child influencers were being exploited by parents and family members seeking to make money in the lucrative market. Some content can also affect the children’s privacy and pose security risks, the committee said.
The MPs urged the government to tighten the UK’s child labour and performance regulations to include provisions on working hours and conditions, mandate the protection of a child’s earnings, ensure a right to erasure, and bring a child’s labour arrangements under the oversight of local authorities.
To protect young content consumers vulnerable to native or embedded advertising and “disinformation and harmful messages,” such as certain body images, the DCMS Committee also recommended more support for children, parents, and schools to help children develop media literacy and strengthen advertising rules to include mandatory enhanced disclosure standards for advertisements targeted to children or an audience composed predominantly of children.
According to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, a survey suggested that up to half of the country’s children watched vloggers or YouTube influencers in 2021, with 58 percent of children aged 5 to 16 watching YouTube daily for an average of almost 2 1/2 hours.
The committee also called for a code of conduct for influencer marketing to be commissioned.
In addition, the report urges the government to conduct a study into the influencer ecosystem so that it can be properly regulated as it grows, manage rules around pay standards and practice, and for advertising regulators to be given more power to enforce the law around advertising and close influencer loopholes.
“The rise of influencer culture online has brought significant new opportunities for those working in the creative industries and a boost to the UK economy,” said Julian Knight, chair of the committee. “However, as is so often the case where social media is involved, if you dig below the shiny surface of what you see on screen, you will discover an altogether murkier world where both the influencers and their followers are at risk of exploitation and harm online.
“Child viewers, who are still developing digital literacy, are in particular danger in an environment where not everything is always as it seems, while there is a woeful lack of protection for young influencers who often spend long hours producing financially lucrative content at the direction of others.”
Knight noted that “inaction” had left regulations behind the times in a digital world, and that this was particularly concerning when it came to the protection of children.
