Photo of the child on the first day of school, or while eating, sleeping, doing fun activities at home. For many parents, sharing photos of their children on social media is a consolidated habit, sometimes accompanied by the addition of details such as the child’s name, his age and where he lives. According to a European study, parents share an average of 300 photos of their children online every year and by the time their fifth birthday they have already shared almost 1,000. But the Italian Society of Pediatrics (Sip) launches the alert on the risks associated with the phenomenon of sharenting, or the sharing of images of minors on social networks.
The top three destinations for these photos are Facebook (54%), Instagram (16%) and Twitter (12%). The photos ‘before birth’ are also on the increase. A quarter of children have some kind of online presence before they were born: in the United States, 34% of parents routinely post ultrasound scans online, a percentage that stands at 15% in Italy. However, there are various lurking risks of which the parents themselves are often unaware and which involve issues relating to the protection of the image of the minor, the confidentiality of personal data, digital security, and which can also expose them to child pornography. Thus, while in France a bill that would like to limit the sharing of photos of children online is under discussion in Parliament, in Italy, already last November, the Ombudsman for Childhood and Adolescence Carla Garlatti urged for sharenting the applicability of the provisions on cyberbullying, which allow minors to directly request the removal of content. To take stock of this phenomenon is now a study already available online and being published, in the Journal of Pediatrics, of the European Pediatrics Association, of which Pietro Ferrara, head of the Study Group for the rights of the child, is the first author of Sip.
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