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The case of a little girl with a lot of charisma and 17 million followers on TikTok brings back to the table an old and great question: Is it okay to post images of children on social networks? Internet users have started a whole movement pointing out how exposed the three-year-old minor has been seen on this platform and have denounced the behavior of her mother and a series of irregularities around her publications.
Wren Eleanor is the name of the TikTok account of a nice girl who, at just three years old, has more than 17 million followers.
The profile is managed by the minor’s mother and is full of videos in which she is seen smiling and playing, but users on social networks made a discovery that has set off alarms.
Several people noticed that certain videos of the little girl, which were later deleted, not only had inappropriate comments, but a rather unusual number had been saved. One of them was saved by 370,000 users. The girl’s mother received a series of criticisms for the way in which she was exposing her daughter, but she only limited herself to deactivating the comments on TikTok, and the most serious thing is that, being aware of the matter, she continued to publish new videos. .
Other users, mainly mothers, said that, given the situation, they had begun to delete videos and photos of their children to avoid exposing them in that way.
The initiative is part of a movement promoted through the numeral #SaveWren, which translates “Save Wren”, and through which a series of videos have been produced rejecting the actions of the little girl’s mother, who is accused of putting the money she makes from posting over her daughter’s safety and privacy.
Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are full of content similar to Wren’s: parents posting their children’s daily lives. A similar case arose in Colombia. A well-known influencer aroused a wave of criticism from those who accused him of mistreating and ridiculing his daughter in the videos that she shares on her account and in which she has more than seven million followers.
A standardized practice?
France 24 spoke with Heidy Arévalo, knowledge management manager for the NGO World Vision, about this type of exposure of minors on social networks and why it has become normalized. The expert questioned the fact that some parents treat their children as if they were objects of their property.
“This highlights two very critical issues. On the one hand, it is unacceptable to continue considering that what happens to children is a private matter and that it only concerns the family. Because we must remember that, constitutionally, society is called upon to protect girls and boys (…) But on the other hand, there is society and there are the users who reproduce, who ‘like’ it, who also share this type of content and who go constructing discourses and logics around normalizing these forms of violence against children,” said Arévalo.
And it is that minors cannot decide for themselves if they agree that their image is repeatedly promoted on the Internet. Heidy Arévalo assures that their right to privacy is being violated, and that one of the repercussions is that “they cannot easily differentiate between what is right and what is wrong when they develop their moral dimension.”
He also mentioned that perhaps the little ones “will not be able to distinguish when someone is violating them, abusing them, because their figure of protection made these practices of abuse and violence a game and a joke.”
Finally, he called on people who plan to publish images of minors or who are already doing so, to ask themselves if it is necessary to do so, what implications it could have and how much it can affect the little ones.
“Let’s review those details that we overlook. Let’s check that there is no way to exploit these images because many times parents publish photos in the most naive way, but someone else is going to take them for other purposes and with other intentions” , he pointed out.
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