Almost a century later, SAG-AFTRA and others have worked to strengthen the original law to better protect the assets of child actors. In 2000, California law changed to ensure that any income minors made from the entertainment industry was their property, and did not belong to their parents. In California and many other states, parents and guardians are required to set aside 15 percent of child actors’ gross earnings in a trust for their future use. In addition, most states have laws that regulate child actors’ employment, with some of the strictest, like California’s, restricting how many hours a child can work and other provisions.
None of these laws, though, apply to children making money on the internet. That’s a problem, writes Marina Masterson in a 2020 piece on “kidfluencers” for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. “Because kidfluencers have no legal right to these earnings or safe working conditions, the risk of exploitation is extreme and immediate,” Masterson writes.
Masterson, however, acknowledges the issue is complicated to fix. After all, even regulating child actors has been a struggle, with a “patchwork” of state laws regulating the industry rather than a federal mandate, she says. Regulating kidfluencers, who are most of the time being filmed or photographed in their own homes by their parents, is even more complicated.
As Masterson writes, “Certain common child actor regulations, like those involving work permits and workplace conditions, are difficult, if not impossible, to impose on kidfluencers.” This is due to the nature of how the content is produced and filmed. There’s no set, no working hours, and no script. Rather, the filming is spontaneous, in their own home, generally without a set schedule.
For example, some states dictate how many hours a child can be on set in a typical film production, which is pretty easy to enforce. But it’s much trickier to enforce a work hour limit, Masterson writes, when the “set” is the child’s own home. “Even if the state set an hour limit that these children can work, the only way to enforce that rule would be to monitor the families within their own homes, which would be an overstep by the state,” she writes.
Thus, trying to make Coogan Law protections apply to kid influencers would be “largely unworkable in the fast-paced social media context, which is generally confined to the family unit,” she writes. “Financial protection is immediately possible through Coogan Laws, but regulating the content production itself presents new and challenging questions that require states to consider the specific needs of the social media industry.”
Ultimately, Masterson says she believes that at the very least, Coogan-style financial protections should be enacted to protect kidfluencers. But she concedes that the other issues are complicated, recommending lawmakers “continue to research and refine the appropriateness of other regulations.”
As of now, though, she writes, kids and parents are mostly on their own to regulate themselves: “Children spend hours per day producing high-valued content at the direction of their parents with no financial or personal protection besides the good will of their parents.”
