A free speech activist on child influencer laws
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Last week I published a deep dive on how bad and dangerous I believe these laws claiming to “protect child influencers” are. My piece focuses on the Utah law, and I also made a YouTube video breaking it down.
Unfortunately, the media continues to publish misleading stories praising these laws and pushing a moral panic about young influencers. Not a single one of the reporters or influencers who published inaccurate information about the Utah law has corrected their stories or videos.
Today (below) I have a guest post from Pratika Katiyar, a free speech activist and tech policy researcher who also had thoughts on the law.
She writes about the effort to establish a “right to be forgotten” in the U.S. through these child influencer laws, and why people should think twice before supporting them.
A free speech activist on the danger of Utah’s law to ‘protect child influencers’
By Pratika Katiyar
Utah is the latest to establish a law claiming to protect child influencers, joining Illinois, Minnesota, and California. On the surface, it’s about protecting privacy, but it could have far-reaching consequences for journalism and free speech.
For the past few years, I’ve worked on tech policy issues like consumer privacy, free speech on social media, and ethical AI governance across the public and private sectors. I’ve seen firsthand how legislation designed to protect fundamental rights can sometimes do the exact opposite—especially for marginalized communities.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my own legislative advocacy is balancing free expression with other fundamental issues, only to watch lawmakers introduce bills that claim to safeguard one thing while quietly undermining another.
In my perspective, the Utah law is part of a broader wave of child privacy legislation such as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, which claim to protect minors and their privacy online but instead introduce vague or overly broad restrictions that risk suppressing lawful speech and access to information.
Such coordinated legal efforts around child privacy sound well-intentioned at first, but have the potential to undermine critical discourse, a consequence that cannot be ignored.
The Utah law specifies that individuals who are at least 18 can “request that a content creator delete or edit any social media content that the content creator posted” featuring the individual. Utah joins Minnesota in including such a provision, in an attempt to protect individuals who were thrust into the public eye as minors without their informed consent. Though this applies in cases “where the content creator received income from social media of at least $150,000 in a calendar year,” the provision still raises concerns about the scope of creators that it encompasses.
Content creators are defined broadly in the law as “an individual who produces social media content,” meaning that journalists or digital news organizations can fall under the term and thereby fall under the law, posing significant implications for press freedom.
Imagine a teenage activist in Utah leading a pivotal protest, covered extensively on social media via news outlets and journalists, all deemed content creators. Now, imagine that same activist, a few years later, deciding they want all social media coverage from these journalists on their involvement erased.
If broadly interpreted or interpreted in bad faith, this law could create a chilling effect on factual and legally obtained reporting that includes minors. Journalists might face pressure to alter or remove stories post-publication on social media platforms, potentially undermining the integrity of news archives.
Such a policy could also set a precedent where subjects of news reports—not just child influencers—could demand retroactive changes to accurate reporting, complicating journalists’ ability to document critical events and movements.
News coverage, increasingly on social media and via news influencers, often involves minors in stories about politics, education, and crime. Take stories about the Parkland school shooting or the Black Lives Matter protests for example–the social media coverage from content creators and journalists following these stories was extensive, yet all at risk for deletion requests under these child influencer regulations.
In evaluating deletion requests, the law states that a court will consider “any emotional harm or substantial embarrassment the social media content causes the individual; the interests of the content creator in the social media content; and the public interest served by the social media content.” However, these criteria are highly subjective, making enforcement and legal interpretations unpredictable and possibly inconsistent.
Take GDPR in the EU as a case study. Having briefly worked in GDPR compliance at a Big Tech company, I’ve seen both the positives and negatives of the EU’s comprehensive privacy law. The Utah “minor’s right of deletion,” seemingly included to give individuals greater control over their online presence, reminds me of GDPR’s “right to be forgotten” provision.
However, its implementation provided a case study on how the provision could compromise the integrity of public records and open the door for potential misuse of the law. For instance, in 2021, the European Court ruled that a Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, had to anonymize the name of a man convicted in a fatal car accident from its digital archives, leading critics, including media organizations like The Guardian and The Times, to warn that it set a dangerous precedent for rewriting history.
Similarly, the case of the Italian news outlet PrimaDaNoi, which was overwhelmed with takedown requests and the costs of litigation and ultimately had to shut down, further underscores the risks. While the Utah law mainly addresses minors, it risks setting a similar precedent—one where the guise of privacy is used to burden journalists with legal threats and ultimately weaken public access to accurate, historical information via media archives.
These child influencer laws are not yet widespread, but risk setting a dangerous precedent.
The chilling effect of this could pressure journalists into self-censorship, preemptively avoiding stories involving minors to prevent future legal challenges. Additionally, the possibility of legal action against content creators raises concerns about sustaining independent journalism at a time when journalism is already at a decline, as independent journalists or smaller news organizations who fear litigation may then be less likely to publish potentially controversial albeit truthful stories that involve minors.
As a free speech activist who has fought for press freedom and student journalists, I’ve worked with young reporters navigating censorship, seen how legal loopholes are used to silence critical voices, and pushed back against policies that claim to safeguard rights while quietly eroding them.
We should be protecting young people from exploitation, but we can’t do it in a way that might compromise free expression and freedom of the press. Striking a balance requires ensuring that privacy protections do not become a mechanism for erasing inconvenient truths.