Blog #7

Child Influencers: Ethical or Unethical?

Social Media influencers have such a big effect on today’s youth. Influencers set the current trends, tell people what clothes they should buy, how their hair and makeup should look, what movies and shows to watch, and sometimes even how to act. Not only have they accumulated a large following, but influencers tend to become very affluent as well. When I think of influencers my mind immediately goes to the Kardashians. This giant family is known for setting the trends. Whatever they do, soon the rest of America follows. Influencers hold so much power on helping to create the culture of tomorrow.

There’s a lot of hate about social media influencers specifically. Many people think that influencer culture is dumb, however, most people end up listening or joining in on a trend set by an influencer as well. This culture is too prevalent to escape. In fact, influencer culture doesn’t start with teenagers and young adults. In fact, there’s an entire niche group of children influencers. Most of these famous kid YouTubers channels are run by their parents and consist of videos of these child influencers playing with toys. I was shocked when I found out this was a real thing and was thrilled to do some more digging. 

To find a video that seemed worth reviewing I had to go through three Youtubers to find something worthwhile. The first Youtuber I tried was Seven Awesome Kids and it seemed like many of her videos were deleted. Next, I tried watching Hailey’s Magical Playhouse and it was just a girl walking out in different Disney costumes with soft music playing for a minute straight. Next, I watched Hulyan Maya’s youtube channel of her reviewing the Peppa Pig inflatable. I was 5 minutes into the video and there was still just meaningless chatter, I noticed that the video was 30 minutes long and had to end it there. Finally, I came upon Kid’s Toys Bad Dog Challenge game review. This one was a winner.

These adorable sisters are 5 and 7, and their brief videos consist of them assembling the toy, explaining the rules, and then playing with the toy. Quincy Faye and Laurice are the two cute sisters of Kid’s Toys with over 2.5 million subscribers. These sisters live in the Philippines and have over 2.9 trillion views in total. Their Bad Dog Challenge game review was pretty simple but still seemed to get many likes. After watching a few different of their videos my personal favorites are any reviews done on Barbie dolls, although I wasn’t a huge fan of any of their videos. These sisters don’t really engage their audience at all and hardly even talk in their videos. I know that they’re only children so I’m being less critical, but I think that they could do a lot more with their videos, especially when compared to the Youtube videos of other child influencers. 

After reviewing Kid’s Toys Youtube channel, I noticed that they typically post about 5-7 times a month. However, for the past month and a half during the COVID-19 lockdown, Kid’s Toys have been posting new videos daily. This is tripling the amount they normally post. It’s ironic because most families are financially suffering during this time while the Kid’s Toys family is able to make so much more money since they have so much more time on their hands than usual. They are probably also attracting more viewers than normal because of how frequently they’re posting. Also, they’re probably also getting new viewers because people are spending more time online while in quarantine. I wonder if the percentage of parents who watch their toy review videos and then actually buy the toy ratio will increase because parents are looking for activities to keep their kids busy. 

Unfortunately, Kid’s Toys settings don’t allow their users to leave comments. This also hides all the previous comments as well so I couldn’t review any. That made me question how bad the comments had to have gotten in order for their parents to decide that it would be better just to hide to turn off the options of comments altogether. I’m assuming there were many negative comments that they didn’t want their children to see. Although it's hard for me to imagine that people would bully Quincy Faye and Laurice. Especially because their peers aren’t old enough to use Youtube by themselves. Hopefully, this setting will help protect the kids from the negative sides of being an influencer, like dealing with hate comments.

After reviewing Kid’s Toys, my final observation is that there was nothing fancy or even well done about these videos. In half the videos you could hear a baby crying in the background, their parents didn’t even bother muting the microphone or editing the audio. There’s very basic public domain music playing through all the videos. Additionally, there’s nothing subtle about these transitions. Overall, these videos have very sloppy video work and editing. It's amazing to me that this channel has millions of subscribers when the content is simply just two girls playing with toys. In a world full of influencers, it’s shocking that a Youtube channel could be so successful with so little production and thought to go into it. 

Although I don’t necessarily understand the reason why Kid’s Toys has 2.5 million subscribers, Quincy Faye and Laurice are child influencers nonetheless. It’s frustrating to me that their parents would expose them and use them on social media on such a large scale. With influencers like the Kardashians, it's clear that they all chose their fame. However, their kids did not. That’s the reason why they have made the decision to keep their children out of the spotlight and not give them a lot of screen time on their reality tv show. People like the Kardashians are well aware of the negative sides of being influencers and don’t want to subject their children to the same life. However, the parents of Kid’s Toys have made the opposite decision for their children, and profit off putting their children in the spotlight. Angela Scheinbaum notes some concerns about social media, “there is a dark side of social media. Consider the following (unintended) consequences to some aspects of social media present in this framework: body shaming, online fraud, cyberbullying, online brand protests, social media addiction, and revenge porn,” (2017). These are just a few of the very real consequences that come along with anyone using social media. Being an influence multiplies all of these consequences. For Quincy Faye and Laurice’s sake, I hope their career as a child influencer has very few repercussions, because I don’t think their parents are aware of the dark sides of life as an influencer. 

References

Scheinbaum. Angela. (2017). A Framework For The Dark Side of Social Media From Digital Drama to Digital Over-Enhancement. New York: Routledge.