 Welcome folks. We're just giving everybody a minute or two to settle in. We're so happy you could join us virtually here today with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Welcome. As folks continue to join us, I'm going to go ahead and get this wonderful conversation started. My name is Leah Plunkett. I'm joined by my fabulous Berkman Klein Center colleague, Jen Louie, as well as our fabulous Berkman Klein events and communications and other staff team members. We also want to thank our wonderful friends at Harvard Law School and everyone else at Harvard University who supports our work. Today, we are thrilled to offer you a first of its kind discussion, the Young and the Influential Labor Law Reform to Protect Kid Influencers. We have with us today and you will get full intros in a moment from Jen. We have with us today leaders from the great states of Illinois and Washington in advocating for practical, ethical, just common sense reforms to state labor law to protect this generation's child entertainers. I first started writing about something that I and many other people call sharenting a portmanteau of the words share and parent back in 2017, 2018. Sharenting probably requires no definition, but I'll give a brief one anyway because I'm a law teacher and that's what we do. And sharenting refers to the ways in which parents as well as other trusted adults transmit children's private information digitally. In my book, literally and metaphorically, I'm not trying to sell the book, it's available for free and open access. I also talk about commercial sharenting, more commonly referred to as influencer content, whether it is kid influencer, child influencer, teen influencer or family influencer, this kind of content creation which takes kids' private experiences and shares them on social media or related platforms, usually by parents or by other trusted adults for the purposes of commercialization is a largely unregulated here in the United States global industry that by some estimates is likely in the billions or certainly millions of dollars. And until the great state of Illinois had a reform to its state labor law signed this past summer by their governor, we didn't have in the United States any laws on the books in any state that included this generation of commercially sharented kid influencer superstars who are providing entertainment across social media and other digital platforms. And this discussion is the first of its kind because it is the first time that we are able to bring together in an academic setting youth advocates and legislative leaders from Illinois which has now passed and signed the first state labor law reform for kid influencers into law as well as Washington state which has been at the forefront of working on legislation to put these kinds of protections on the books. We are here today to spark a dynamic, iterative, robust conversation with youth advocates and legislative advocates so that we can learn alongside of them about how they have done their work and how they might share some insights and suggestions for others from all constituencies who are interested in ethical practical state labor law reform to protect child entertainers in the digital era. With that I would like to pass the virtual microphone and stage over to Jen to introduce our distinguished panelists. Jen over to you. Hello, well thank you so much and I'm also honored to invite our guests. I believe that this will be the first but not the last of this conversation and so fully anticipate that we will be having a continuation of this conversation hopefully for many many more times to come. I'm pleased to introduce that addition Professor Leah Plunkett who is the Meyer Research Lecture on Law at Harvard Law School and faculty associate at the Burkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University is facilitating with myself. Senator Kaler was elected to the Illinois Senate in 2006 and is the state senator for the prairie area of central Illinois. He was promoted to the majority caucus whip in 2018 and is assistant majority leader in 2019. Representative Reeves is a working mom, former foster youth and small business owner who advocates for working families, educators, veterans and building an economy that works best for all and outside of legislature. Reeves is a community and economic development equity inclusion and organizational development consultant and is representative for the state of Washington. We have Chris McCarty who is the student founder and executive director of Quit Clicking Kids and in 2020 they began researching the behind-the-scenes workings of family influencer accounts and organizing informational webinars about the perils of oversharing online. In 2021 they started a cold calling and cold emailing Washington state legislators to craft legislation to protect children online. We have Shreya Nalamothu who is a junior at University High School in Illinois and she's interested in law, civic engagement, social justice and this past year worked with the Illinois state senator Senator Kaler to introduce and pass the nation's first-ever law protecting child influencers. Myself, I am a research assistant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. I'm also the integrity institute's fellow, one of the research fellows this term as well as a founder of the Moral Innovation Lab. So I'm going to kick off with a quick question and I'm really curious for each person's personal orientations what has perhaps led you to have an ethical position on this area of advocacy? Were there any particular personal motivations or public occurrences that you witness that strongly orient your position on the digital rights and freedoms of children with regard to their social media use and their labor? And perhaps I can start with Chris if you don't mind. Absolutely, yeah. I started researching after I read the story of Otea, now an infamous family vlogger who had made a lot of monetized content featuring her child who's a special needs child that she adopted from outside of the country. She had made 27 adoption journey videos featuring this child. She had used a lot of his like personal adjustment stories including some really intimate personal details to sort of garner more interest in the account and garner like a lot of support for the family channel writ large. However, she then later relinquished custody of the child without telling anybody just one day he stopped showing up in their videos. So it prompted this huge backlash of like you used to have another child where is he what happened? And of course then that followed the stereotypical youtuber apology video in which this particular vlogger said well we didn't want to say that it wasn't working because we wanted to respect his privacy which like following everything that they had shared previously in the frequency and the depth of information that they had been sharing previously seemed like there was a little bit of a disconnect there. So that prompted me to really do more research in like what other disconnects exist in the family influencing industry. Might then pass on the question to Representative Reeves. Well you know I became involved in this issue very quickly because Chris reached out and wanted to engage on this topic and you know I think as all advocates do there's somewhat apprehensive about the reception that they're going to get from elected leaders but for me it was a quick yes. I'm a mom of two young kids. I'm an eight year old and a 10 year old. I'm an elder millennial who grew up in society with the absence of the internet and have watched the internet grow over the course of time. And as a public official myself right who has put my kids on campaign flyers you know who shares online because that's a lot of how we communicate with our constituents and my kids both like to be included and sometimes don't like to be included. It was a really easy sell for me to say hey you know what you're right this is a big gap in kind of our regulatory space and this is someplace that we should be thinking about not just as parents but as a society as a whole about how we're making sure that we're protecting our kids in this process. And so thanks to Chris for reaching out and leaning in and leading on this effort and I have the distinct honor of being able to help partner with them to continue moving this legislation forward. Shreya if I might ask you to share your thoughts. Yeah so I have to say my position on the issue of kid fluency was a pretty natural conclusion for me. You know I'm part of Gen Z and so we're really the first generation to have always grown up online. You know our parents share pictures on Facebook. I'm always on Snapchat. Everyone watches YouTube so I grew up online and alongside kids who were just like me who were being exploited online and over the pandemic I watched a lot more family blogs than I'd care to admit and I saw that there was just a ton of unchecked exploitation happening in plain sight for anyone to see and I was just really able to empathize empathize and relate with these kids which motivated me towards reaching out to Senator Kaler and seeing what I could do to help. Senator Kaler would you care to share with us your perspectives? I need you to unmute one moment. Yeah I should know that by now. Yeah I'm actually a baby boomer. We're all talking about what generation we come from. So this is not something that I had any natural affinity towards. I don't spend a lot of time watching videos and all that but when Shreya sent a letter it was really my staff that picked it up and said they didn't need to look at this and so they got in touch with Shreya. We also got in touch with Chris McCarty and I must say that the two of those individuals really kind of helped to generate some momentum for us to do something. Shreya came down to Springfield to testify in the Labor Committee as did Chris via remote and their grasp of the subject just kind of really impressed the whole committee. I mean they blew him away quite frankly and so it was a good bipartisan bill. We had support from both sides. In fact I'm a Democrat. One of the Republican senators stood up and said about this bill. I said my staff said this is really important and I'd better pay attention to it. It passed unanimously out of the Senate and I really have to commend and I really respect the advocacy of both Chris and Shreya for doing this because as people in my generation we don't necessarily know this on our own. I mean I've got granddaughters in high school so they kind of keep me informed as to what's going on but we do need to pay attention and you know as a legislator I learned a valuable lesson in just being able to sit back and listen and to try to pay attention. I hope that both Chris and Shreya learned a lesson that if there's something important to do you just got to reach out and do it. So I'd like to open up the question a little bit more about how do you envision ideally the future to look when it comes to youth engagement online and how has that maybe shaped the ways that you've chosen to pursue legislation? Well this legislation there's there's still an undone part of it. You know I need to explain from Illinois point of view we really followed Washington's lead and Representative Reeves you know you kind of set the model for us and so we looked at that we said what are other states doing in this regard? There was two components of it. One was the child labor piece the other was the privacy piece and we had to separate those two because the privacy piece is a much more difficult thing to achieve because and right away when we filed the bill I had a visit from Metta of course and they wanted to know just what we had in mind and all this but we ended up separating this and only dealt with the child labor piece and so what we did was we put into place much like the acting laws for children that if parents are going to monetize this then they have to set aside a certain portion of whatever revenue they get for the child and once they turn 18 then they would have something to look back on. The privacy piece is a little more difficult and I have had a conversation with somebody who was familiar with what Europe is doing in terms of privacy so we're going to pursue that as a separate matter and I've talked to the attorney general of our state and we're going to engage with him and people in his office in a conversation about this but I think it behooves us as letters later to look and to see what you know in life in society is affecting people and especially where you have an adverse possibility and this is not to put a condemnation on people that do do vlogging in some ways you know perfectly fine but you need to pay attention and if you're going to monetize it and what I've seen in terms of videos that have passed on to me this is a family business this is big money you know we're talking not only thousands of dollars but in some cases millions of dollars and so this needs to be treated very differently isn't grandma just sending out a few pictures you know over the internet this is this is a business and we need to treat it as such and I would love I would love to just jump on to what the senator said because I think that's an important distinction that when we talk about share and saying I'm a mom I'm proud of my kids I want to share over you know Facebook and other places you know I'm on tiktok I want to share what's going on in my family's life but I think where the distinction really gets drawn is when it becomes a compensation model and when we begin being compensated for those activities it's no longer sharing it's a commercial activity and so for us in Washington we don't actually think you can separate privacy and child labor because in in this new economy when you are pursuing economic means through a very public space like this privacy is a key component of how we regulate that that economic means and so our legislation and probably the reason that we haven't been able to move it just quite yet is because we have drawn the line that those two things have to go hand in hand in order to make sure that we're getting to the outcome that we're looking for and I think to your question Jen you know this is really about the ethics of making sure that the internet is the safest place for our kids to be because this is where they are and this is where they're going to be moving forward and so how do we make sure you know as a mom as a legislator that I'm thinking about the regulation of the space in such a way that it's not just a workplace but it's a playground it's a school it's and so how do we make sure that we're thinking about it through all of those facets and doing so in a way that we're really getting to what the future of our economy the future of work the future of education looks like for this next generation and Chris and others have really been leading the charge on helping make sure that we're thinking systematically about this work and so we've started with child labor protections because that seems to be the most immediate need we have regulations on the books around child labor and the acting space but what was fascinating for me is that when we started talking to the lawyers the lawyers said well do we technically define kids on social media as actors because that's not the current understanding of what an actor is we don't even define in law what vlogging is right and so some of this is just about making sure that our regulations our statutes catch up to the current societal understandings of what we're trying to regulate and then making sure that those definitions are in alignment with the actual implementation and the practices and so we're being really thoughtful here in Washington about how we get to that I've also been visited by meta and others and I'm actually really excited to say that they were not they did not come to shut us down they came to partner with us to figure out because I think they have some similar goals around how we make sure that children are really safe online and it's just about finding that alignment and moving it forward yeah absolutely I think you both raised some really really great points as far as like ideal and goal legislation I think what we'd want to see is something on the federal level mostly because we don't want to see what happened with kogan laws which only exist in a select few states to happen with these new child stars and additionally I know there's some connections to child acting I just want to clear up a really common misconception which is that even though this type of acting is or this type of work is very similar to child acting it is not the same because child actors how I understand how difficult their work is to the best extent that I can not having been through it myself but they are portraying a character they are not having their real lives exposed online and used as entertainment in that way so I think that's really critical to understand it's true that the Washington state bill and the Illinois bill by extent were sort of modeled off of kogan laws especially in the that sort of like trust fund access to financial compensation part but there is a very clear distinction to know there and I just wanted to really quickly bring that up I think that would be helpful to understand yeah absolutely and if we're talking about common misconceptions I think and this was something that came up when I got to go testify for the bill back in March in front of the labor committee there were a lot of people who thought that this bill was you know just for one off being posted on facebook type of things this is for people who build entire careers off of being influencers and turning their children essentially into cash cows and replacing family income so this isn't for just sharing pictures and videos of your kids online to a close circle of friends and I think that's super important because this the Illinois law isn't trying to get in the way of a relationship between you know a parent and their child we're just trying to strengthen that and provide some protections and aid the parent and keeping their child safe and their income safe so we definitely don't didn't go into this thinking that every single parent who posted their kid online is malicious and I don't want people to think that because we really want to work with them and partner with them to ultimately lead to a better future for the child which is the end goal of all of this absolutely and just to bounce off of that really quickly that's what the original framework of the Washington state bill and then sort of that was added to the Illinois bill is designed to do when I first was participating in the process of drafting that bill with a nonpartisan council staff member of Washington state we wanted to make sure that this bill was as narrowly and specifically tailored as possible so I think Senator Kaler said like this is not about you know a grandmother sharing home videos with her children right like this is not that this is a very separate like Shroya said this is regulating people who this is becoming their career right so just to get very technically legal for a couple seconds which I feel like this is an okay place to do that there's really really specific thresholds right there's a threshold that says your account has to be generating a certain amount of revenue which we have defined in Washington and Illinois is greater than or equal to 10 cents per view and there's a threshold that says you have to be sharing your kids at least 30 percent of the time within a past 30 day period right and that's those thresholds are there to say like if you're a large influencer and you're making a lot of money off of your account but you're only sharing your kids maybe for the holidays like it's not frequent it's just they sort of show up in the background they're not being the main characters that's not going to be subject to this legislation and on the flip side if you're frequently showing your kids but your account has like three followers that's this is not something that is going to impact you thank you so much Chris this is definitely a wonderful place to get into the weeds on legal terminology and I'm actually going to ask for a few more minutes of follow-up discussion on legal terminology because professional hazard I love digging into legal terminology and I think you've all spoken so eloquently about the very thoughtful very balanced very values driven inclusive ways that both Illinois and Washington have tailored the language that has gone in to the different bills and I would love to hear starting with whoever wants to jump in as you think about the bill in your particular state be it Washington or Illinois are there any other specific terms that you think it might be really helpful for our audience many of whom might be thinking about this for the first time to understand right because we've talked a little bit about vloggers, kogan laws, trust accounts, things that if you are immersed in labor law with a focus on entertainment our familiar terms that the kogan law for folks at home that that Chris was very stutely referring to refers to a law passed out in California now pushing a hundred years ago not quite there yet to protect Jackie kogan who was a child star who unfortunately was subject to financial exploitation by his parents and so we'd just love to hear from each of you a little bit more maybe pick your favorite terms or terms in your particular state's legislation and tell our audience a little bit more about how you landed at the specific nuances of the terms you're using and part of why I'm asking this is as I said professional hazard lawyers and law teachers love language and also the language here is extraordinarily important because there's so many places and representative reads you were talking about this where we have ubiquitous practices when it comes to kids and digital life whether that is every day life or commercial life and they aren't always being named like when I went to write my book about sharing thing it took me a while to figure out what term or terms other people having this conversation we're using because the idea back in 2016 2017 that we needed to talk about talking about kids online seemed kind of weird because you know I will I will situate myself in our generational trajectory here I'm the tail end of gen X I have one of these I've got a couple of kids I've got a couple of dogs I have a very adorable guinea pig right it's sort of like the norm to just pick up your phone and say things and so really just would like to spend a couple of minutes hearing more about the terminology that you are all curating because I think it's so important to this emerging national and international conversation I won't cold call but please unmute yourselves and jump in well let me let me just say that that and I appreciate the conversation I think I think that I'm learning something as we go through this but you have to understand that when when you take an issue like this and you bring it before a legislature they you don't know what level of understanding they have so we had to introduce new ideas the reason that there's been a reference to the kogan laws because people understand that you know and there's there's a framework of understanding with that it's different though and we had to introduce terms like like vlogging and so you know for the first you know a couple weeks we had to say well this is what vlogging is this is what kid influencing is and but I think that the difference and I'm glad that Chris talked about you know this isn't just a one-off appearance of some kid in a video this is where the child is featured and where the idea is that it's being monetized and and so I think that's the distinction I do want to say that I respect Washington's approach and Representative Reeves what you're talking about I think is very true you cannot separate these two you know the labor aspect from the privacy aspect they go hand in hand and that's why we have another you know another part of this to finish but it was important at least for us to get something down so that we at least got people's attention and we could start the educational process and I think we've achieved that now the part is we've got to dig in into the real nitty-ditty pretty details about how do we protect privacy you know you know the common understanding is that once it's on the internet it's it's out there forever well is it I don't know I mean I'm not I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a a technologically you know proficient person in terms of internet technology I'm a legislator so I have to I have to deal with kind of the interpretation of it when it comes down to a level of getting something on the books and getting something done thank you completely go ahead Chris yeah I was I was going to say I really do think that the Illinois bill passing and being assigned into law was a really great step and I think that was initially so this is a little bit of black story but Representative Reeves is actually not the first sponsor of this bill in Washington state she has been a wonderful champion and I'm so honored to continue working with her the very first sponsor was Representative Emily Wicks in Washington state but because that bill was drafted in a short legislative session in Washington which is a the Washington legislative sessions which Representative Reeves can vouch for are a little bit weird they have the same call the short legislative session which is as the name implies a lot shorter than what a regular session would otherwise look like so when this policy concept first came into into Washington state it was introduced during a short legislative session where it needed to be drafted at a really quick turnarounds time where most of the bills were already drafted and also already introduced right so I knew at that time that because of the way the schedule was working that the bill was probably not going to make it very far however we had that bill draft we had something that could then be used for the next legislative session so that's what Representative Christine Reeves and I have been working on like continuing to improve that very very first bill draft as House Bill 2032 and then of course that bill draft also paved the way for Illinois she said as a freighter right so I do think to tie back to Senator Kayla's point like it is really important to take those first steps even if they aren't perfect because that's that's how you that's how you get places and you can't let the perfects get in the way of the good that being said I do agree with Representative Reeves that the privacy and labor issue can't be separated and I really hope that that's something we're able to continue in Washington State I know it's particularly difficult for us just because we have so many technology companies headquartered here so I think that stumbling block is is considerable and it's not to be ignored but I am looking forward to the ways in which tech companies are going to use their technological advances particularly with regards to AI to develop things that can help regulate this so it can make sure that the internet is safe and it's also reducing any potential burden that the tech companies would be facing yeah absolutely um again speaking to that idea of the first step there's a lot more to be done especially with the mental health aspect of being a child influencer because yes you can get the money back but that childhood that is lost is irreplaceable so I'm really optimistic though about the future of legislating this industry I think that Senator Kaler has really shown that it can be done and so that was super important if going back to that initial question of like defining terminology we've talked a lot about how lucrative the child influencing industry is so I kind of want to explain really quick to influencers even because everyone knows influencers they're super they can be pretty rich but it's a little bit obscure how that happens so there's a couple ways that influencers can make money and it varies from platform to platform but it's typically through ad revenue brand deals affiliate links and sponsorships so the thing that the Illinois bill and the Washington bill focuses on the most is ad revenue so when you're watching a youtube video typically you know at the beginning sometimes through the middle of which gets really annoying is there's advertisements and and if a channel is big enough they can get money every single time that ad is watched and family vlog channels are of course super advertiser friendly and kid appropriate so they typically have a ton of ads on their videos and they generate a pretty high amount of money and so what Chris was talking about with that 10 cents per view means if every time someone watches your video you're making 10 cents off for that view that constitutes something that would need to be legislated so again it's not every single channel but you just have to have enough subscribers and enough views that you're making a substantial amount of money yeah that's such an important point to get into like the details of what the finances look like for these accounts because I think that is really abstract a lot of the times there was actually a really good article by credit karma that came out and share this might be also in part what you were referring to and they had this statistic that said monetized youtubers with 100,000 subscribers could make around $1,800 per week which translates to about like 93,600 annually and that's just from partnering with google's ad sense program so that would just be from ad revenue that would not be like the other forms of income that share was talking about like sponsorships affiliate links even like merchandise for a lot of the channels is another source of revenue so it is important to know that these bills are definitely still like being made better right and that's like the challenge of regulating a new industry because it's so new there's not been any legislation that we're really able to work off of there's a little bit with the kogan laws in terms of like you know putting money aside for a child in escrow once they reach the age of majority but in terms of like real specifics there's not a lot to go on so this is something that we're continuing to learn about and develop is something that has more and more research about this issue continues to come out and be made widely accessible I think we'll be able to make it better and stronger and have it protect the most amount of kids and in typical political fashion I want to make sure I'm going to take the opposite viewpoint and just say while we are also working to ensure protections for children I sit on the consumer protection and business committee as the vice chair and one of the things we really focus on is the fact that legislation needs to be done pragmatically there are always multiple perspectives to every problem that we are trying to solve and you know as the daughter of a single mom who grew up in and out of foster care you know who has experienced homelessness I'm also thinking about that those kids in those multi-generational families who are trying to figure out how to help create revenue for their families so that they can live you know sustainably and so this isn't about shutting down participation on the internet or preventing that participation from happening but it's about making sure that as it becomes a commercial industry as we've seen that we're making sure that both the opportunity and the protections go hand in hand so that when kids are making these choices if they're choosing proactively to participate in this industry if their parents are choosing proactively to participate in this industry that there are at least sideboards to ensure that folks are making those decisions with all of the information possible that there's you know unlike uh the kubernetes law where there's you know children um what are they called set teachers right who are required how do you provide a set teacher in somebody's personal home right we've got to be thinking about those parameters so to your point about definitions dr. plunkett it's about thinking pragmatically and thinking about what all of those potential spaces could be and then making sure that we're using either existing regulatory definitions creating regulatory definitions to to create those sideboards or going out to industry and asking them to help us define it right so that we make sure that we're doing it with with care and thought in mind and so I would just close by saying there are multiple sides and multiple perspectives to problems to solving this problem and that's the work that we're trying to do in washington is making sure that all of those voices are included in the dialogue as we move forward thank you so much I think we have about four or five more minutes of questions from myself and gen and we'll open it up to questions in our q and a tool so gen I have been uh hogging hogging the floor asking questions about definitions do you have any questions for our panelists before I take it back and move us toward q and a next I'm going to reference two things that chris have brought up um one which is big tech which I'm kind of curious about how that plays uh into how you're navigating the space and uh understanding the challenges around their positions or the partnerships that you've kind of developed but also uh you've also brought up AI um in a really positive light and so um I do have a question um as a follow-up uh around how do you see AI potentially impacting this future vision for healthy engagement with youth and social media I can kind of answer part of that oh you can go for sure I go ahead cool thanks I was just kind of kind of say um I really view it as a double edged sword because as chris was talking about companies can use AI to you know better regulate and screen the content that's being uploaded to youtube um you know past like the capacity that they have with staff so it can definitely be a useful tool for protecting children but on the flip side and this is something that I've seen in my own life you can also use artificial intelligence to manipulate images of kids that you've posted online you can um you know upload things that were not created without someone's consent you can steal identities from just um a couple of your parents facebook posts so there's really two sides to the issue and I think the question is really how can we use AI for good um also mitigating some of the inherent harms that it provides yeah absolutely I was just going to say like I've been doing some research on how this would work just to prove that it's feasible on the end of the tech companies I do think it's important I think one of the common misconceptions that I see around people who are saying like oh well actually this is not that big of an issue like this is actually okay um I think there's this misunderstanding that children won't grow up and go back and look at previous content that featured of them they won't go back and read the comments about what people are saying about them and that this information that's been shared um with seemingly little regard for their privacy and for their safety and in certain circumstances um that definitely like once you have a digital footprint it is very very hard to remove it um which is again part of why the privacy protections are in the Washington state bill and we're originally in the Illinois bill um I do think it's important to know that as AI technologies advance as reverse image searches advance as things like Pimaeus will advance it is increasingly easy to find out what thing somebody is tied to online and I think this has the real potential to hurt children once they become adults and start applying for schools once they start applying for jobs um generally in a lot of different areas I think that these um like negative things shared about them online or even like things about mental and physical health which is unfortunately very commonly shared in these types of accounts will influence them in negative ways later on I think um something that's really important to just sort of like get a a better grasp of how how deep and how serious this issue can run is if you were to look at it from the flip side if you had a 16 year old who's a really really popular influencer had a monetized account was making a lot of revenue but the things she were posted she was posting and uploading were just her mom videos of her mom every day her mom saying that she hates her boss her mom having trouble with her colleagues her mom breaking down after having a fight with her husband like if the if this kind of like level of stress and and like not not the tantrums that we see in children but like a similar level of stress and invasiveness and and viewing somebody at sort of their worst points especially with regards mental and physical health um but then that was all being monetized on their 16 year old daughter's channel I think there would be a much larger backlash I think you would have a lot more people saying well of course this is not okay you know why is that child sharing such intimate information about their parents all the time and why are they using it to make money for themselves um so that yeah there is this sort of disconnect when the child's on the other side of the camera and that's something that I hope helps illustrate just how potentially problematic this issue is. Thank you so much Chris. Senator Kaler representative Reeves anything on the AI topic before I move us to Q&A? This is a fascinating discussion uh and it shows you what a complex issue this is going to be to deal with because we're talking about something that that I don't quite technologically understand but uh I think what government's role is is to set the parameters and to say here's what is acceptable here's what we deem as harmful and and and really try to uh without you know trying to be the thought control police we can't do that we've got First Amendment rights but we do have to I think draw the line in terms of what you know what is acceptable what is beneficial for society and what is harmful and I think that it's the harm part where we have to step in and say you know this is not acceptable um where we draw that line is is a difficult thing and and how we use evolving technology to do that uh means that we have to partner with the big tech you know we have to partner with with people in the industry and and come to an understanding as to um you know where we can see uh commonality in terms of drawing that line um that's going to be the task in in front of us and I think that we have to um help educate all of us you know in society and if we're talking about legislation we have to educate legislators because um there's you know I don't know about Washington but in Illinois that's that's a task we have to be about you know we there's people that are not tuned into this I wouldn't be tuned into it if we weren't for for Sharia and Chris um but but that's our job and that's where we have to go yeah and and Dr. Plunkett I would just close by saying you know I live south of Seattle we live in the silicon forest here in in Seattle and um I actually see it as a kind of a blessing quite frankly that there are so many tech companies in our region who can be helping inform us on where those lines get drawn ultimately it becomes my job as a legislator to build the coalition of folks and make the decisions about where those boundaries should or shouldn't live in statute and so um as we think about AI I would argue to you know to Senator um Taylor's point uh it is such a it's not a new technology it's been around for over a decade but it's come on to the kind of public scene so quickly um that I think what folks maybe uh you know to Sharia's point aren't recognizing is that there are um barriers right in how we use this new technology uh we've been talking about here in Washington as challenges around profiling right the technology is still written by humans and still can have um inherent bias in it how do you mitigate for that how do we make sure that as uh you know AI become moves forward to Sharia's point we're not using it as a weapon right that we use it as a tool and so there's going to have to be boundaries and sideboards put around that technology as well from a consumer protection perspective just like we're thinking about putting sideboards and boundaries around consumer protections for kid fluencers and so again that's that's the role that we play as legislators is helping draw those boundaries and determine where we accomplish the best good for the most number of people in the public. Thank you so much Representative Reeves. I would like to encourage all of our attendees to hop into the Q&A tool and ask a question our wonderful colleague Madeline from the Berkman Klein Center will be keeping an eye on that Q&A tool and will read us some questions. I have one question that has come in already that I will open up to our panelists which is on this topic of coalition building and looking to places across different industries and across different spheres public private etc here's the question over the summer we heard from leaders in more traditional forms of entertainment like reality star Bethany Frankel that there's an argument that reality TV stars should be included in SAG-AFTRA the the union for actors we are also seeing some momentum around having elite college athletes whose name image and likeness are used being included in SAG-AFTRA a great recent piece on that by our Harvard Law School colleague Mike McCann in Yahoo Sports so I'm curious to hear from our panelists did folks wind up hearing it all if you're able to tell us from any of the entertainment unions we've talked a little bit about tech but did the unions raise their hand at all to say hey we've got a global digital entertainment sector happening that is largely unregulated and we're in the business of being involved quite impactfully in entertainment law and labor in the United States we have some thoughts did did they reach out yet? Not to me they have not but I think that you raise an interesting point life is changing we are now seeing that there is that value being placed on different things just take the name image and likeness you know for years and years we thought well college football just kind of the training ground for the pros and and you know that these folks are uncompensated but they're well now you're looking at a whole different aspect of it and that is that if a person an athlete has some value to their name and to the recognition and to the talent that they have does that mean that they can then monetize that and I think we're saying yes they can so there's there's nothing wrong with monetizing what we do because that's that's how we you know we establish livelihoods so I would say that this is a wide open field and if people think that they have a right to become part of the actors union then I think they ought to have that conversation I mean it's probably not for the legislature to say whether they do or not but we we already have labor laws that say that that people have the right to make that choice and I think we're going to see a lot a lot more of that in our society because people want to have that value respected yeah and I would just talk on and they did not reach out we have reached out to them partly because I think the confluence of the labor dispute that you saw over the summer really highlighted right as I I've spent a lot I shouldn't admit this but I spent a lot of time on tiktok when I'm not doing my four jobs and you know there was a lot of conversation about how uh you know companies and others would be reaching out to content creators looking for them to kind of fill the void uh during the strike and so as a very pro union state here in washington that became an immediate part of the dialogue of does this naturally make sense to be thinking about and I and I think to the senator's point we've already got laws on the books that you know allow for that activity to happen I think what we're trying to really focus on is there are so many legislators and general folks in the public who don't even see this as an industry yet um that I think the work we really have to do is to wrap our arms around the idea that this is a commercial industry that it should be regulated with consumer protection in mind and that once that happens I think there will be a natural confluence to start thinking about how we do worker protections more broadly than just the kid fluencer space but I think we haven't quite hit that peak momentum yet for folks to be drawing that connection thank you representative we still ahead chris go right ahead you're I really quickly while it's still like in everyone's mind I really want to draw it's something that senator caler said which was I think that the way he just described what brings people in to like watch college athletes is really perfect way of describing what brings into people watching family social media accounts right like it's it's about being interested in their abilities interested in what they can do and in a sense like their personal story right like you you're watching them grow you're watching them change and there is a connection there and that's that's what brings people in like part of it is how they play the sport but it's also like who they are that's trying that's driving people in it's the things that they're performing and their connection to what they're doing that is really like getting attention and in a very similar way that's what happens on family blogging accounts and I think that can be problematic in a way I've certainly seen instances where that goes a little bit too far in my opinion on family blogging accounts where you do see parasocial relationships starting to form between like the consumers of content and the producers of the content so you do see a lot of instances of people commenting things on a channel like for example I think there was a question even in the chat that just said like um oh gosh let me just like really quickly look at it um like oh like our parents also seeing some of some of the issues that you're talking about and the good news according to me is that a lot of them are there have been increasing numbers of news stories where parents who have like previously been family influencers previously shared their children on their channel are now like either deleting their channel or they're really really infrequently posting their children and when they do they're not sharing their name they're not sharing their face but what happens oftentimes even when parents make that conscious decision to be more conscientious about how they're sharing their children's information online they will get backlash from followers of the channel who feel this level of entitlement to say why don't we get to see your kids grow up why don't we get to see them doing x y z activities anymore so there's this there's this feeling of like deserving access right and in such a like odd way like I deserve access to see your children and I think if I think to a lot of people because there's this artificial distance between people who are online and people who are like posting content for consumption it doesn't raise as many red flags I think there's a like a misconception that oh well if it's just like an online comment or it's not a real threat there's nothing really to worry about and it's okay but I think if you were to extrapolate that into the real world and it's say your next door neighbor who's saying these similar things who's saying like I used to be able to watch your kids play in the backyard from my bedroom window why can't I see your kids anymore why aren't you taking them to school every morning through the front door anymore why can't I see them like playing with their toys anymore I think that would raise a lot more red flags if your next door neighbor had that level of deep personal investment in your children right because you would know that this is somebody who is near you and who potentially could be a little bit more threatening and because of that artificial distance that is experienced by people online somehow like it seems more acceptable but you don't know because that distance is artificial the person who's commenting on your channel who's saying like why don't I have access to your kids anymore they could be your next door neighbor that's the problem with that artificial distance is you you in reality you don't know who that person is and they could be someone nearby so I think that's important to keep in mind so I'm going to open up to some questions we've kind of synthesized and try to group some of the questions together but they follow the categories of who does the onus fall on in terms of responsibility as well as the methodology by which we either choose education or choose legislation so it summarizes the saying and thank you Madeline for doing this how much of the responsibility to protect children from exploitation on social media falls in legislators versus the platforms themselves who are the proposed and limited enacted legislations putting putting this responsibility on ultimately and then also as the follow-up to that part of the way to protect children from exploitation is intentional education of parents is there are many influencers who for one reason or another don't see their actions as exploiting their kids and so how does this necessary education perhaps fall into different protection plans we'll start there there's a few other questions too so maybe let's have a couple people respond to these and then we'll move on to the next yeah I can tackle a little bit of the first part of the question when we're talking about who the responsibility falls on the legislators or the tech companies and you know RepReeves was speaking to to this a little earlier I really think that it has to be a partnership because the fact of the matter is that it's going to be impossible for legislators to try to regulate an industry that's so online like child influencing without getting support from these industries and if so we really want the best outcome for the child it's going to have to be a partnership between legislators and tech companies to see well I can tackle this and you guys can do this and ultimately we can create a safer online experience we can't just entirely shift that onto tech companies or entirely put that onto legislators you know the the the one thing that we I guess learned in the process of doing the the bill in Illinois was that we had to make it simple we had to make it so that that we put in place what the expectation was and that we gave the the tools for somebody to have you know legal or corrective action at at the time when they turned 18 became an adult so we we first of all toyed with the idea that well maybe the the Illinois Department of Labor ought to be the place where we collect all this information in terms of you know the details that Chris lined out as to how much are you in the video and and how much are you owed and all this and as we got to thinking about it we thought you know that that is really a design to fail because the state can't handle doing that we've got so many other things that that we we have to try to handle so what we did is we we said okay here's the expectation but say that a child has the right to have you know a remedy so they they can sue and they can they can look back and say you know either you know my parents did this or not and people say well well how do you know how much money they receive well first of all it's the legal requirement is that if you get money you have to pay income taxes so you can certainly look at income taxes in that regard but so that that doesn't set the state up as as being the one that that makes this happen it sets up the the child who becomes an adult to look back and and that simplified the process and that really said that you know we're we're on your side and that if there's been a wrong that has been done we want to give you the tools to to correct that but don't rely on the state just to be the ones that are going to oversee this because that's not our role and I think that's that's a good you know distance to have from that so whatever we do let's do it simple so that we so that we give the expectation but that we also give the tools to correct what we would need to correct that's our experience thank you senator taylor we only have a few more minutes i'm going to ask another sort of synthesized question with thanks to Madeline for helping us look at the wonderful questions that have come in by a chat and q and a my question is two parts sorry law teacher hazard open to anyone who would like it the the first part is when i wrote my initial book one of the articles i looked at was like a 2017 new york times story with a headline along the lines of why isn't your toddler paying the mortgage and a profiled um these these two twins mila and emma stoffer who at that point were two years old and i got curious the other day and i went online and i looked up mila and emma and they look like they're thriving right they're they're preteens they've got a clothing empire they have been featured in all these magazines and so the two part question is the following you know in the course of this wonderful coalition building work in different states did folks particularly our elected officials but also our wonderful advocates hear from kid influencers or family influencers who are making a you know happy living here and wanted to give you feedback about how they were doing that and then my next question is if you were a parent or caregiver and you wanted to start a family influencer business from the ground up what are some tips for how to do so ethically and practically and successfully starting of course with compliance with any uh labor laws in your state so we've got a couple of minutes so maybe just half a minute or so each and then we'll we'll wrap it up that was quite a question um no i did not have any contact with uh with with families and i don't know why uh we we i think we had a lot of interest as we were doing this but perhaps when we when we went through the process of legislation there wasn't as much attention on this when the governor signed the bill then all of a sudden that's when the attention came and so it was kind of a delayed you know process there but um you know how families would go about this again i don't know that's something we can't legislate i mean what what you talked about in the beginning of the program is that let's let's do things that you know common sense that are moral that are ethical that are you know within the realms of decency um and you know that that's that's should be a no-brainer but what happens when when that when that goes foul is that we have to have some you know as representative re said we have to have some some side rails some guard rails on this uh and and i think that's where where government comes in and where legislation comes in um is that we don't want to disrupt the market i mean there's a lot of good things that are going on out there let's let those things happen but it's when things don't go so well or when people are harmed that we do have to sit in and and you know have consequences for that thank you i would say i would say really quickly um similar to senator caler i've not had contact from parents but a lot of the colleagues that i've been working with and advocating with and quick-licking kids have um direct communications with the children who are being featured on these types of accounts um and the things that i hear now of course this is all secondhand but um the situation from the way they describe it really closes really closely matches the research that's been coming out i think there's been a lot of really impressive scholarly research that's just starting because of how like new this industry is but now also that it's more in the public eye right so i think um there is this kind of tendency to want like first person accounts and i think that's really great and helpful but i think um one of the like really small silver lining of people sharing so much information about their family online is that oftentimes you don't need the first person accounts um due to like existing um like psychological resources where you can kind of infer okay given like what we already know about past cases whether that's like child actors other child entertainers or um just like general child fame we're able to really extrapolate that research onto this and of course it's not going to be the same but i think it is a mistake to wait for like an entire generation of kids to grow up and have first hand accounts and not do anything to legislate the issue in the meantime and then i would say for um to the other part of your question for parents who are looking to like set up a family influencing account right now i'm not sure if there is a completely ethical way to do that especially if that becomes your sole source of income because i think then there is a really clear conflict of interest between your parent who is also your boss and managing your personal life as well as your on-camera life as well as your finances so i think those are really important to keep in mind i'm not saying that all family accounts are unethical i'm just saying it is really important to be mindful of your child's privacy it is mindful it is important to be mindful of how you are presenting them online and how that information could potentially come back and harm them later thank you so much chris and thank you to all our distinguished panelists to my co-moderator jen to our wonderful bkc and harvard law school staff and to all of our guests we hope you'll stay engaged with us and with all of the tremendous leaders who spoke here today thank you so much and take good care