(de-news.net) – The CDU’s Women’s Union has called for more stringent regulation of so-called “child influencers,” maintaining that children’s appearances on social media platforms should be permitted only under clearly defined conditions and subject to prior authorization. A draft motion prepared for the CDU’s federal party convention in February seeks to clarify and extend the applicability of Germany’s Youth Employment Protection Act to children who generate commercial content for online platforms outside the context of professional film or advertising productions. The initiative is framed as a response to the growing commercialization of children’s online presence and aims to close regulatory gaps that have emerged alongside the expansion of social media–based income models.
Under the proposal, children who are depicted online for commercial purposes by their parents or by third parties would be regulated in a manner comparable to child performers in established cultural and media sectors, including theater, music, advertising, and broadcasting. By aligning social media activity with these existing categories, the framework would formally recognize the production of profit-oriented online content as a form of work. In this context, children under the age of 15 who participate in the creation of monetized social media content would be legally classified as employees, thereby bringing their activities within the scope of established labor protections.
Nina Warken, Federal Health Minister and chair of the CDU’s Women’s Union, underscored that children’s rights do not cease to apply in digital environments and that commercial considerations must not outweigh the principle of child welfare. She warned that family-oriented influencer formats frequently involve the systematic monetization of children and the public disclosure of private, and in some cases intimate, aspects of their lives. Such practices, she argued, can place children in situations where safeguards may be necessary even against decisions made by their own parents. From this analytical standpoint, she maintained that the existing protections of youth labor law should be applied to online content production in the same way they are applied to child actors, emphasizing that media content marketed as harmless family entertainment often constitutes a form of child labor when examined more closely.
