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Child Exploitation and Youtube
Social media is deceptive and lucrative. Youtube, Instagram, and other platforms where sponsorships exist allow users to earn an income by being popular. While this is all fine and well for consenting adults to participate, the waters become murky when young children become involved.
I watch Youtube videos every day. I don’t have cable and I enjoy watching true crime documentaries and commentary videos after work. I stay in this bubble, and my only knowledge of family vloggers was of the Shaytards channel, which I had watched when I was a child. The parents, Shay and Katilette Butler, along with their several children, had filmed themselves and posted new videos on Youtube every single day for years. I lost interest in the channel around age 13, and I haven’t kept up with them since.
As a child, I thought that the Shaytards’ videos were entertaining because it showed kids doing fun things that I, as a child, would have also wanted to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if the target demographic of such channels is 8–14 years old. The children were arguably the focus of the videos. Would the Shaytards’ channel have become as popular if they didn’t have several cute children running around in their videos? Their channel currently has 4.9 million subscribers with their last video having been posted a year ago. Their most viewed video is from five years ago with 30 million…
