Child Influencers and Social Media: Need for Legal Protection in Nepal

Abstract

Children are no longer merely audiences of social media. In many monetized accounts, they are the attraction, labour input, data source, brand vehicle, and emotional centre of a commercial enterprise. Nepal’s Constitution and laws protect children’s dignity, privacy, participation, education, freedom from exploitation, and protection from harmful work. However, these guarantees were designed for familiar settings such as the family, school, workplace, media, advertising, and offline abuse. They do not clearly regulate the commercial use of a child’s image, voice, personality, data, and everyday life on platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, particularly where parents or guardians organize and monetize content from the home through advertising, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, gifts, livestreaming, or platform revenue. This article examines whether Nepal should enact protections for child content creators. Using doctrinal legal analysis, child-rights theory, and comparative review of France, Illinois, California, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, it argues for a targeted Child Digital Content Creator Protection framework. Such legislation should not operate as a broad social-media control law. Instead, it should define commercial child content, impose fiduciary duties on parents and guardians, restrict harmful work, safeguard education and leisure, secure a fair share of earnings in trust, establish child-centred privacy and erasure rights, regulate advertisers and agencies, and impose proportionate platform duties. It also proposes implementation through Nepal’s federal structure and existing child-protection institutions.