By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

As someone who regularly photographs community events for this paper, I’ve noticed that many Generation Alpha children shy away from my camera. It happens often enough that I now seek not only a parent’s permission but the child’s own buy-in before I raise the lens. They seem to know something the law is only beginning to catch up to. A new Tennessee law that took effect today aims to give children of social media influencers more control over how their image is used for profit — but the gap between what the law promises and what a child can actually do to enforce it may be wider than lawmakers intended.

CHILDREN UNDER 14 CANNOT APPEAR IN MONETIZE CONTENT

Senate Bill 1469, signed by Gov. Bill Lee on April 16 and effective as of today, July 1, establishes Tennessee as one of the most assertive states in the country on child labor protections in the content creation economy. It passed the House 92-0 and the Senate 29-2 — near-unanimous bipartisan support that signals how uncontroversial the underlying principle is, even if the mechanics are complicated.

The law applies when a content creator earns at least $15,000 annually and a minor appears in 30 percent or more of their monetized videos within any 30-day period. Under those conditions, two things happen. Children under 14 cannot appear in that monetized content at all — a flat prohibition, with a $2,000 civil penalty per violation. Children between 14 and 17 must be compensated, with their earnings deposited into a trust account held by a qualified financial institution, accessible when they turn 18.

The law also gives minors 14 and older the right to request permanent deletion of content in which they appeared. Creators must comply within 30 days or face civil action. Content creators must maintain detailed records of the minor’s involvement and compensation until the child turns 21.

One clarification worth making for readers who may have heard a broader version of this law: it applies specifically to video content, not photographs. A Facebook photo post alone likely does not trigger the statute as written, though TikTok’s primary format is video, so most monetized TikTok content would qualify.

ROOTS IN CHILD LABOR LAWS

The bill’s origin is worth understanding, because it isn’t abstract policy. Senator Page Walley, R-Savannah, introduced it in October 2025 with a specific problem in mind.

“Most of our child labor protections were really written at a time when kids were at risk of working in coal mines or in fields,” Walley told the Nashville Scene. “They really hadn’t been updated to keep pace with our digitalized economy.”

He was also watching specific cases play out publicly. Ruby Franke, whose YouTube family channel “8 Passengers” had more than two million followers and one billion views at its peak, was charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse in 2023. The children at the center of her content were also the victims of her crimes. Jessalyn Grace is a quieter but equally instructive example: she created and posted content as a minor while her mother managed her accounts, and by the time she turned 18 she reportedly had no access to the earnings her content had generated — or even to her old accounts themselves.

“With all of the issues around pedophilia and misuse and abuse of kids and child labor, I wanted to just get ahead of it,” Walley said. “I wanted to make sure that we protected these youth from exploitation, particularly at a time when it’s been so visible on the news.”

Tennessee also had a practical reason to act. The state ranks fourth in the nation for Instagram influencers per capita, behind only Washington D.C., California, and New York. Nashville’s family content creator market is substantial. This wasn’t a hypothetical problem for Tennessee legislators. It was happening in their own state, at scale, with no legal framework to address it.

AN OLD PROBLEM IN NEW CLOTHES

The Villanova University School of Law’s Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation, which analyzed SB1469 in May, made a point worth sitting with: this is not actually a new problem. Long before family vlogging existed, child performers like Michael Jackson and Brittney Spears generated substantial income in Hollywood while remaining vulnerable to manipulation, overexposure, and financial control by the adults around them. Brooke Shields, Macaulay Culkin — the cast of almost any beloved child-centered film or television series from the past century — the pattern is consistent.

California’s Coogan Law, passed in 1939 after child actor Jackie Coogan discovered his parents had spent nearly all of his childhood earnings, was the first legislative attempt to address this. It required that a portion of a child performer’s earnings be held in trust. Tennessee’s SB1469 is, in many respects, Coogan Law logic applied to a smartphone and a ring light.

What social media has changed is scale and access. Unlike traditional entertainment, where child labor laws and contractual structures provide at least some accountability, the kidfluencer economy operates largely within the private sphere — frequently inside the home itself, with a parent as both the employer and the sole gatekeeper of the child’s image, earnings, and digital identity.

NEW TN LAW’S ENFORCEMENT GAP

Here is where the law’s most serious limitation emerges, and it’s one the statute itself cannot fully resolve.

The deletion right under SB1469 allows a minor 14 or older to request removal of content in which they appeared. The request goes to the creator. In most cases governed by this law, the creator is a parent or guardian. There is no independent enforcement mechanism in the statute that allows the child to go around the parent directly to the platform. If the parent refuses to comply within 30 days, the remedy is civil action — a lawsuit. A 14-year-old cannot file a lawsuit independently. They would need a guardian ad litem, an attorney, and the intervention of the court system.

Which means a child asserting their rights under this law against the parent who is monetizing their image must ask the legal system to intervene in a family dispute. That system is already slow, expensive, and emotionally costly for adults. For a minor living in the home of the parent whose behavior they are challenging, the practical barriers are significant.

Coogan Law had the same structural weakness. It passed in 1939. Children almost never sued to enforce it. The protection existed on paper; the power to use it rarely did.

WHAT RESEARCH SHOWS ABOUT CHILDREN AND CAMERAS

The children shying away from my camera at community events aren’t an anomaly. Researchers studying what’s been called “sharenting” — the practice of parents sharing images and information about their children on social media — have found that children are developing a visible and increasingly documented discomfort with involuntary image exposure, even when it is well-intentioned.

A 2024 study published in the proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems analyzed sharenting behavior on TikTok and found that 97 percent of videos did not mention whether the children in them had consented to being posted. Five videos in the dataset showed a child actively objecting to being filmed. A 2020 survey of Czech and Spanish parents found that of those who regularly published pictures of their children online — roughly 80 percent of respondents — only 20 percent had obtained their child’s consent. Some parents in the study deliberately ignored the child’s objections.

Researchers studying the long-term effects note that children who grow up with their image routinely shared online may struggle with questions of identity and autonomy as they age — wondering how the version of themselves that exists in the digital record, curated entirely by adults, relates to who they actually are. That’s not a clinical diagnosis. It’s an emerging area of research. But the behavioral evidence — kids turning away from cameras, kids asking not to be photographed — suggests something is already being internalized.

A FLOOR, NOT A CEILING

Tennessee’s SB1469 is a meaningful step. The near-unanimous vote suggests this is one of those rare moments where legislators across the aisle agreed that children deserve protection in a space where none existed before. The trust account requirements, the deletion rights, the compensation thresholds — these are real, enforceable standards where there were none.

But the law is a floor, not a ceiling, and the harder cultural problem — the one that produces children who flinch at cameras — is one that statutes alone cannot solve. What the law cannot do is change the power dynamic inside a home where a parent controls a child’s image, income, and digital identity. It cannot give a 14-year-old the practical means to sue their own parent. It cannot undo what has already been posted.

What it can do is signal, clearly and with the force of law, that children are not content. That their image has value. That when adults profit from it, children are owed something in return — and that they have the right, at least on paper, to say no.

The kids at my community events already seem to understand that. They just needed the law to catch up. •

About the Lynchburg Times: The Lynchburg Times is Moore County’s locally owned, independent news source and the only Lynchburg media source own by a Lynchburg native. We are also one of the few women-owned media organizations in the state. Our reporting is supported by readers, small business partners, and underwriters who believe community journalism matters. If this story was valuable to you, consider becoming a supporter at lynchburgtimes.com.