Is It Ethical to Post Pictures of Your Kids on Instagram?

In France, a child can sue her parents for posting pictures of her on Instagram. On any social media network, in fact, it is the responsibility of the French parent to protect a child’s image. The Gendarmerie have even posted on Facebook about it: “Préservez vos enfants!” The law rests on the principle that the images you post of a non-consenting child will endure in the future, and thus may distress or shame the child in the years to come.

We all sort of know this, but brush it off as part of parents’ prerogative to embarrass their kids. Nobody thinks twice about posting a picture of their child throwing a tantrum, for example. Parents have always celebrated their children against their will, from the family photo album on the yuletide knee to the Facebook update.

But all social media platforms are not created equal, and the ones we favor are rapidly changing. In March, the Pew Research Center announced that 35 percent of U.S. adults now use Instagram, an increase of seven percentage points from 2016. Instagram is on a sharply upward trajectory in American culture, challenging, if not surpassing, Facebook as the central place where people perform their identities online.

At the end of 2017, I wrote that Instagram had served as an escape hatch from the awful reality of living in Trump’s America. But by the end of this year, Instagram has become something different. The app has become so dominant, so commercialized, and so lucrative for so many people, that the meaning of its content has changed, ethically compromising even those users who make not a dime from it. This is particularly true for those who post images of their children, since the publication of an intimate family photograph is so fraught with moral questions.

Instagram has become a place where images of children are swapped for cold, hard cash. This poses a multifaceted ethical predicament. If your child likes being photographed, but can’t understand what it means to be famous online, how do you interpret their wishes? Let’s say that your child doesn’t care either way, but your Instagram account gets popular enough that you get free stuff in exchange for your posts, which the child gets to enjoy. Would you be denying the child freebies that they’ve technically earned, because your own moral foibles got in the way? What if you don’t earn anything tangible, but feel like you have to keep posting in order to stay popular, relevant, or even just to seem like a good parent?

As a 2018 Time piece noted, the role of Instagram “influencer” has facilitated a shift in so-called “mommy-blogging,” from standalone websites to social media accounts. Instagram is absolutely full of these shills. A mom, usually white, posts photographs of her beautiful and shining children, in her beautiful, shining home. There’s Susan Sarandon’s daughter @thehappilyeva, former Bachelorette star @alifedotowsky, and the 4.1 million-strong @kcstauffer, to name but a few. These are the paradigmatic mommy-bloggers, and they make money.

To me, this content is exploitative, tacky, and, as France agrees, neglects both the autonomy and the future happiness of the child. Indeed, its very awfulness is part of its appeal, encouraging legions of hate-follows. Want to know how Australian performance-mom Courtney Adamo gets her money? Try scouring the archives at GOMI (Get Off My Internets), a delicious forum dedicated to bitching about the people embracing the influencer career path. As the lifestyle blogger Hey Natalie Jean told The Guardian, GOMI “legitimately put [her] on antidepressants.”

As another GOMI user, Shelly Lyon, told The Guardian, these posters “were pimping their children out on social media for likes and page clicks, which brings in sponsors and brings in money.... it takes out any semblance of autonomy or privacy these kids have. And I find that really distasteful.”

Also, the products they hock are usually ridiculous, like breakfast protein powder.

The IG mommy-blogger poses two chief questions for the regular Instagram user. First, is there a political argument for letting the mommy-bloggers be, even following them? Second, what is the regular, non-famous parent supposed to do about the new economy of Instagram parenting?

One could argue that these women are simply entrepreneurs. If a stay-at-home-mom becomes an Instagram-famous mommy-blogger, and therefore derives an income that recompenses her otherwise unpaid domestic labor, her claim on that cash may well trump the rights of her child. Women traditionally perform undervalued work that is nevertheless crucial to the functioning of society. Maybe the mommy-blogger has simply found wages for the second shift.

Then again, these women (there are a few men, but only a few) are overwhelmingly white, able-bodied, and beautiful, and so are their children. Blame the entertainment and advertising industries, if you want. But it’s our clicks that become the numbers that companies use to calculate who gets what sponcon deal. Every time Instagram serves up some blonde Midwestern domestic goddess on the Explore page and you reward them with a tap of your finger, you are participating in an attention economy that is, through the dark art of the algorithm, continually reinforcing racist and classist ideals of what it is to be lovely, successful, and female.

It’s a system that implicates everyone. Let’s say that you’re a parent. You’re not famous, and you post about your kids in the form of a public diary, updating your friends and family with the events of their day. There’s nothing distasteful there. Unless, well—is your account public? Do you find yourself choosing pictures of your child that make you look like a good parent?

Everybody curates their public image online. But it is worth considering whether the parental instinct to seek company—to be made less alone in the long journey of parenthood—is compromised by the cues and rewards built into the platform itself. Things get uncanny, for example, when normal people post portraits of infants that are elaborately staged and obviously taken with expensive cameras. Even if the parent is not sponsored by a corporation, she or he might as well be, aesthetically speaking, in their effort to represent the child (and their life in general) in portfolio form. The Instagram grid becomes a kind of resumé.

And what if your child does ultimately become Instagram-famous? Once this happens, and your child gets recognized in the street, say, then you have lost control. In a recent article on Babble, for example, the writer asks whether it is “weird” for an adult to follow a child on Instagram. She is reassured by Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of the etiquette queen Emily Post, who says no: “It’s not weird at all to follow a kid on Instagram.” She adds, “It’s not like you’re spying on a child through their bedroom window.”

But it is a little weird for adults to follow children. There are so, so many children with their own Instagram accounts, and they exist because adults have shaped that “career path.” There are child makeup artists who seem like professionals prepping themselves for the inevitable Ellen appearance. There are children on Instagram who are famous for simply being beautiful. (Behold: @beautifulmixedkids.) It may not be akin to spying on a child through their bedroom window, but adults are the ones who are making real money off this stuff—the executives at Instagram and Facebook, and the parents who control the endorsements that kiddie content reels in.

If you’re a normal parent, most of this has nothing to do with you or your intentions. (The media will always tell you that you’re doing everything wrong, and I’ve no wish to malign the innocent.) But, just as Post is missing some important data points in her analysis, I think the rest of us might be too. Just think about what you were like at age 7, 10, or 12. Unless you’re a very young parent, you probably did not grow up with photographs of your childhood splattered online for anybody to find. Beyond the old trope of the Hollywood child star—not encouraging—how can we possibly know what that kind of exposure does to a kid?

When I discussed this article’s ideas with a colleague of mine, she predicted “a wave of memoirs, circa 2030, by people who were psychologically damaged as children because they got posted about too much.” That could be your child. You could be condemning them to a career of misery-memoir with every photo you post. They might not grow up Kardashian-famous, but if you Instagram your child in public and at regular intervals, then you might be doing something that you cannot undo. So take a moment at the turn of the New Year to sit with the new facts of social media and how they could affect your kids’ future happiness. Unless you’re French, in which case just watch out for the cops.

Since reentering politics several years ago, Donald Trump has defined himself in opposition to a single figure: Barack Obama. He was the leading proponent of birtherism in 2011 and continued to promote the conspiracy theory publicly until 2015. (He reportedly has remained a birther in private.) Some believe Trump only decided to run for president because Obama made fun of him once. In declaring his candidacy, Trump described Obama as a “negative force” who was “not a leader.” And his campaign platform, such as it was, centered on undoing Obama’s legacy: He pledged to reverse Obama’s immigration policies, repeal Obamacare, and, in the words of running mate Mike Pence, undo “every single Obama executive order.”

He has governed as promised. “Trump is obsessed with Obama,” New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote last year, noting that “much of what Trump has accomplished—and it hasn’t been much—has been to undo Obama’s accomplishments, like pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate agreement and reversing an Obama-era rule that helped prevent guns from being purchased by certain mentally ill people.” He concluded, “For Trump, the mark of being a successful president is the degree to which he can expunge Obama’s presidency.”

Two years into Trump’s presidency, however, it’s clear that he aspires to undo more than just the Obama era. Some of his most high-profile actions have sought to reverse decades of progress—by Democratic and Republican administrations alike—in protecting the environment, workers’ rights, and public health. If Trump succeeds, his own legacy won’t be defined by his erasure of Obama’s accomplishments so much as the destruction of the modern regulatory state as we know it.

Andrew Wheeler, the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, last week announced a plan to rewrite the Clean Water Rule, a 2015 regulation which ensured that small bodies of water like wetlands and streams would be protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972. But the new rule, if implemented, would do much more than just reverse an Obama-era protection. “This would be taking a sledgehammer to the Clean Water Act and rolling things back to a place we haven’t been since it was passed,” Blan Holman of the Southern Environmental Law Center told the Los Angeles Times.

Vetoed by President Richard Nixon but overridden by Congress, the Clean Water Act originally only gave federal protection to traditional “navigable” waters—i.e., water that can be navigated by boat. But the bodies of water covered by the law were expanded several times over the years. George H. W. Bush implemented a policy that broadened federal protection for more wetlands, and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton strengthened Clean Water Act protections even further.

The EPA’s new rule would effectively erase many of those developments, giving federal protections only to permanent bodies of water, and only to wetlands directly adjacent to very large bodies of water. In some states, that means more than 70 percent of wetlands would lose their safeguards, according to the BBC.

The Clean Water Rule isn’t the Trump administration’s only attempt to revert America to a less enlightened era that long predates Obama. In April, the White House proposed dramatically weakening the Endangered Species Act, the immensely successful wildlife protection law signed by Nixon in 1973. Trump’s move represented “the most sweeping set of changes in decades,” the New York Times reported, eliminating “longstanding language” about how to most effectively protect plants and animals facing extinction.

The administration is also proposing to effectively gut the National Environmental Policy Act. Another bedrock environmental protection law signed by Nixon, it ensures that environmentally important land isn’t bulldozed solely in the name of economic development. “The Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to the review process that allows scientists and the public to have a say on federal projects that harm clean air, water and wildlife,” said Paulo Lopes of the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is the beginning of the largest rollback in the history of the National Environmental Policy Act....”

And earlier this year, Trump’s EPA loosened a Clinton-era rule intended to limit toxic air pollution from major industrial polluters.

But environmental policy isn’t the only area where Trump’s deregulatory efforts extend beyond the Obama era. In November, the Federal Communications Commission repealed a Nixon-era rule prohibiting a single company from owning a newspaper and television and radio stations in the same town. That rule was “developed and implemented by Republicans,” according to Politico, to prevent the monopolization of local news markets by a single company. Last year, the Department of Labor proposed a new rule to replace Obama-era regulations on tipped wages. If the rule takes effect, tipped workers would no longer own their tips, “a custom that dates to the 1974 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act,” The Washington Post noted.

The White House is also proposing to “streamline” nuclear safety regulations that have been in place since 2001 and eliminate pet food safety inspection requirements that have been in place since 1988.

Trump has not succeeded in rewriting or repealing any of these rules yet; it’s a time-consuming process. First, the public is invited to comment on the proposal. Those comments are then taken into consideration in drafting the final proposal, which, inevitably, faces lawsuits. Some of these proposals may be rejected by the courts; many of Trump’s proposals to weaken Obama-era environmental regulations already have been. But some, surely, will survive.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, his chief strategist at the time, Steve Bannon, famously said that the new president sought the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” That effort is fully underway, as Trump keeps agencies chronically understaffed and unable to adequately enforce the regulations they’re charged with implementing.

What’s really happening, though, is more sinister: the weaponization of the administrative state. The industry interests and ideologues Trump has selected to lead major government agencies have both the will and the knowledge not only to gut existing regulations, but create new and lasting ones that undo protections that have stood for decades.

“The regulation industry is one business I will absolutely put an end to on day one,” Trump promised in the weeks before being elected president. At the time, it was assumed he was referring to Obama’s legacy. But his words should have been taken more literally. He had a much more ambitious goal, it turns out—a deregulatory crusade that likely will guide his next two years in office. Expunging that legacy will take at least as long, but its harm to human well-being in the meantime can never be undone.

It’s been 18 months since Robert Mueller took over the Russia investigation, and still nobody really knows what he’ll do next. The Daily Beast reported on Thursday morning that the special counsel’s inquiry is entering a new phase focused on influence from Middle Eastern countries. Later that evening, The Washington Post reported that final sentencing for some of Mueller’s cooperating witnesses could indicate his investigation is nearing the end. Some have even speculated that the lack of charges against the Trump campaign itself may mean he hasn’t found anything worth charging.

“Investigators certainly know more than they’re saying—they often repeat as much in court appearances and documents in their various cases,” NPR’s Philip Ewing wrote on Saturday. “But an ostensible conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and the Russians who attacked the election is nowhere near close to being proven.” I’ve argued previously that what’s publicly available so far points toward soft collusion at a minimum: a mutually acknowledged confluence of interests between Trump and Moscow. At the same time, federal investigators have yet to formally allege hard collusion—an explicit quid pro quo between the two sides.

This tension is a staple of the Russia investigation coverage. According to press reports in recent months, Mueller’s inquiry has been at once expanding and narrowing, gaining steam and losing momentum, intensifying and “wrapping up.” Mueller himself has kept virtually silent about where his investigation is headed next or what form its conclusion will take, making him the most mysterious man in Washington. Unless he’s prematurely ousted by the president, the American people won’t find out what the special counsel is truly up to until it’s all over.

This mystery may be by design, or merely the result of Mueller’s sharpest tactical decisions: spinning off parts of his investigation to multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Indeed, it’s no longer accurate to sum up the president’s legal troubles under the banner of “the Russia investigation.” The bulk of the federal investigatory firepower aimed at his inner circle is now coming from outside Mueller’s control, widening the risk to the president himself.

“Investigations now entangle Donald Trump’s White House, campaign, transition, inauguration, charity and business,” the Associated Press reported on Sunday. Or, as the Post put it a day earlier, “nearly every organization he has led in the past decade is under investigation.”

There are plenty of advantages to Mueller’s approach. For starters, it keeps his investigation focused on its primary objective: Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign cooperated with it. The special counsel’s office is believed to employ 15 or so prosecutors—human beings who ultimately can only work so many hours per day. Every hour spent on Michael Cohen’s taxi-medallion foibles or Michael Flynn’s Turkish lobbying arrangements is an hour unspent on Paul Manafort’s ties to Kremlin-adjacent Russian oligarchs or the president’s efforts to obstruct justice.

History shows why it’s wise to keep a White House investigation lean and focused. Throughout the 1990s, independent counsel Ken Starr probed every nook and cranny of the Clinton White House. His team investigated so many different purported scandals without resolution, such as the dubious allegations that White House adviser Vince Foster’s suicide had been a murder, that the American public rightly saw Starr as a partisan political actor. That perception contributed to Bill Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate in 1999 after the House impeached him for the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Mueller’s distribution of investigations to other federal prosecutors has had a multiplying effect on Trump’s legal peril. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is based in Manhattan, may now pose a greater short-term threat to the president than Mueller does. Their investigation into Cohen’s business dealings also found evidence of campaign-finance violations allegedly committed at Trump’s behest. For all the Sturm und Drang surrounding the special counsel, ordinary federal prosecutors in New York were the first to formally connect the president to criminal activity.

It may only get worse for Trump from there. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s current personal lawyer, has said over the past year that he’s focusing on defeating potential impeachment charges because he thinks Mueller won’t indict a sitting president. “[The strategy] is for public opinion, because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach [or] not impeach,” he said in May. As I noted last week, however, the greater risk for Trump is a federal indictment if he loses reelection in 2020. (There’s already considerable debate about whether he can be indicted while in office, but that question becomes moot the moment he’s no longer president.) This would render Giuliani’s media-centric approach somewhat useless. He and many conservative media outlets spent the year baselessly tarring the special counsel as a rogue, unaccountable prosecutor leading a witch hunt at Democrats’ behest. That may persuade Republican senators not to remove Trump from office if he’s impeached, but it’ll do little good against jurors in New York or Washington.

Other U.S. attorneys’ offices are reportedly getting involved, too. On Friday, The New York Times reported that Manhattan federal prosecutors had teamed up with their counterparts in the Brooklyn office to probe the Trump inaugural committee’s mysterious finances. The president raised more than $100 million for his inauguration, much of which came from major corporations and prominent political donors. Of interest to federal investigators is whether Middle Eastern countries with interests in Trump’s foreign policy illegally donated to the fund through American intermediaries.

There are signs that Mueller parceled out portions of this investigation to the federal prosecutor’s office in D.C. as well. The first public indication that investigators were looking into the inaugural committee’s finances came in August, when American lobbyist Sam Patten pleaded guilty to multiple charges related to helping a Ukrainian oligarch illegally buy inauguration tickets. The inquiry could ultimately lead investigators further into Trump’s business empire: ProPublica reported that an uncertain amount of the committee’s money went straight into the Trump Organization’s hotel in D.C.

Cohen’s plea deal in August, followed by his three-year prison sentence earlier this month, shows how Mueller can still extract cooperation from witnesses in the satellite investigations. And with multiple U.S. attorney’s offices involved, Trump would face a much greater challenge in halting the Russia investigation or any of its spin-off inquiries. When former FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier this month, a lawmaker asked him what impact Mueller’s dismissal would have on the current investigations. “As an informed outsider, I think that [you’d] almost have to fire everyone in the FBI and the Justice Department to derail the relevant investigations,” he replied, “but I don’t know exactly what the effect would be.”

Was all of this a conscious tactical decision on Mueller’s part? It’s possible that he spun off ancillary avenues of the investigation to avoid Starr’s fate, or to insulate the investigations from disruption if the president fires him. He may have done so for logistical reasons—perhaps he realized his staff couldn’t pursue it all—or to hew to his narrow prosecutorial mandate from the Justice Department. Whatever his intent, the effect has been deeply damaging to Trump’s political standing and legal fortunes, and it’s trending in the wrong direction for the president.