Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
One of the most horrifying social media pages I&#x27;ve seen was an influencer who billed herself as a &quot;trans activist&quot; and documented every moment of her trans daughter&#x27;s life.<p>This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online (and of course get massive likes&#x2F;shares by well-intentioned folks wanting to &quot;raise awareness&quot;), and request donations for her &quot;activism.&quot;<p>That girl will never be able to &quot;pass&quot; as female due to her face&#x2F;identity being plastered on social media as a trans kid. She also will have to live with the horror of millions of strangers knowing the gory details of her trying to shove a knife into her wrist, chugging Tylenol, and having complete mental breakdowns at school that required emergency medical intervention.<p>My gut instinct also suspects the girl&#x27;s poor mental health has a strong element of Munchausen by Proxy. It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge.<p>Despite all this, the mom was clearly raking in donations, and collecting thousands of comments about what a &quot;hero&quot; she was for &quot;bringing light&quot; to trans issues. The horrified comments by trans individuals were always buried at the bottom of posts.<p>The entire page felt like thinly-veiled child abuse, but there isn&#x27;t anything in Facebook&#x27;s code of conduct that could be used to stop it. And Facebook of course had no incentive to address the content--the page had millions of likes and was surely a great source of traffic&#x2F;profit.<p>I would love to see policies in place to restrict this sort of child exploitation. I am all for freedom of speech on social medical platforms, but blatant exploitation of children in exchange for money is a special sort of cruelty that should be reined in.