Shayla Miller, MJLST Staffer
Minnesota joins a short list of states to pass specific laws protecting children featured in social media content (“kidfluencers”) from exploitation. Effective July 1st, 2025, through an addition to the Minnesota “Child Labor Standards Act,” lawmakers set out requirements for payment of minors featured in social media content.[1]
The Rise of “Kidfluencers”
Social media content creation has quickly become a lucrative career for many individuals—with over 200 million content creators worldwide.[2] While the number of followers, source of income, and profits made from such creations vary greatly, millions of individuals have taken to social media for work.[3] One particular area that has grown exponentially in recent years is “family vlogging,” or content that features families’ daily lives, including the lives of their children.[4] On its face, this content appears to be harmless, family-friendly, and fun for the children involved. Unfortunately, in many cases, the work of these “kidfluencers” amounts to a new form of child labor, with family members exploiting and overworking young children to make a profit.[5] In addition to children working for no pay, in many cases, children are too young to consent to their personal lives being spread online.[6] Severe cases of child exploitation have sparked major media platforms such as Netflix and Hulu to produce documentaries detailing these particularly horrific cases.[7]
State Legislative Response
As a result of the continued growth of the content creation industry and the increased media scrutiny of “kidfluencers,” several state legislatures, including California and Illinois, have considered the adoption of protective legislation. These statutes often create a minimum threshold for a minor’s presence in a video, as well as a minimum threshold for following/engagement with content, before those minors must be compensated. If a particular account meets the threshold, and a particular minor is present in enough content to meet that threshold, said minor must be compensated for their presence.
In California, a minor is considered to be “engaged in the work of vlogging” if they are in at least thirty percent of the content showcased on an account in one year.[8] Any minor who is considered “engaged in the work of vlogging” on accounts that receive $1,250 a month or more must be compensated for their participation.[9] Their compensation should be proportioned based on the percentage of content they are in, thus if a child is in forty percent of the content for the month, forty percent of the profits should be set aside for them in a trust to be accessed once they reach the age of majority.[10] Illinois and Utah have very similar statutes requiring a trust to be created for “qualifying minors.”[11] The goal of such statutes is to ensure that minors who are engaging in the labor of content creation, and helping to turn profits for the adults running their accounts, are adequately compensated for their time and presence in content.
Most recently, Minnesota added language to the “Child Labor Standards Act” addressing “kidfluencers” by creating a framework for their compensation. Under the new law, a minor is considered “engaged in the work on content creation” if the number of views generated by the content meets the threshold for compensation by the platform and the minor is present in 30% or more of the compensated videos within a thirty-day period.[12] Minors who are deemed to be engaged in content creation must be compensated for their work via a trust created for them by the adult content creator, the structure of compensation being dependent on their age. Children under fourteen who are considered engaged in content creation must be given 100% of the proceeds from any video they appear in.[13] Alternatively, for minors between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, content creators must set aside the percentage of their gross income from a video that corresponds to the percentage of that video that includes the minors’ “likeness, name, or photograph.”[14] The main goal of this addition to the “Child Labor Standards Act” is to address concerns with digital age exploitatio,n including the accessibility and the permanent nature of internet content.[15]
Potential Issues with Current Statutory Structure
While the new statute was a step in a positive direction for protecting minors featured in social media content, there are a few pitfalls that may result in the statute failing to effectuate its intended purpose. These include concerns regarding enforcement and a lack of definition of key terms.
Enforcement Concerns
The new Minnesota statute provides a few different mechanisms for enforcement. First, a minor may commence a civil action against a content creator who fails to provide them with a trust account as required by the statute.[16] Second, the state attorney general may bring an enforcement action against a creator whom they determine is not satisfying the requirements outlined above.[17] While both mechanisms appear useful, practicality questions whether a minor will have the requisite knowledge and impetus to bring an enforcement action against a content creator, particularly given that these content creators tend to be parents or other family members. Similarly, apart from the particularly public cases, query as to whether the attorney general will bring an enforcement action against a content creator without the implicated minor first doing so.
Given the recency of the statute’s passage, it is too soon to tell whether the existence of the statute alone will be sufficient to motivate content creators to compensate minors present in their content without enforcement actions. Should the statute itself fail to change influencers’ behavior, a close look at whether the attorney general or minors themselves utilize the enforcement mechanisms will be instructive as to its effectiveness at stopping the exploitation of minors on social media.
Lack of Definition for “Gross Income”
A second potential issue with the new statute is the lack of definition for “gross income.” Content creators are instructed to pay qualifying minors a percentage of the gross income earned from their videos; however, the additions to the definition section of Minnesota’s Child Labor Standards Act do not include a definition for gross income.[18] Alternate portions of the Minnesota code provide a definition of gross income.[19] However, none adequately cover the vast ways in which content creators are compensated.[20] An addition to the definition section indicating that gross income shall include, but is not limited to, all income from; affiliate marketing, platform payouts, licensing content, monetizing expertise, digital products, and all other social media income sources that may develop, would be useful to effectuate the purpose of ensuring minors are adequately compensated for their presence in social media content.[21] Without a specific definition tailored to the income sources for content creators, it is easy to imagine a reluctant content creator cutting corners by only setting aside income for minors from some of the sources through which they are paid for their online content.
Ultimately, the addition of language to Minnesota’s Child Labor Standards Act addressing child content creators was necessary to ensure the Act keeps up with changes to the child employment space. It provides a great step in the direction of protecting minors from exploitation in the content creation space, but it may need some revision to ensure the statutory scheme is enforceable.
Notes
[1] Minn. Stat. § 181A.03 (2025).
[2] Nicholas Bouchard, 40 Creator Economy Statistics You Need to Know in 2025, The Leap (last updated Jan. 29, 2025), https://www.theleap.co/blog/creator-economy-statistics/.
[3] Id.
[4] Communications, Turning Play into Profit: The Dark Reality of Kidfluencing, Ivey (Apr. 29, 2025), https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/impact/read/2025/04/turning-play-into-profit-the-dark-reality-of-kidfluencing/.
[5] Daniel R. Clark & Alisa B. Jno-Charles, The Child Labor in Social Media: Kidfluencers, Ethics of Care, and Exploitation, J. Bus. Ethics 35, 36 (2024).
[6] Ariana Dell, Growing Up in Front of a Camera: The Worrying Trend of Family Influencers Documenting Every Second of Their Children’s Upbringings, Lancaster Univ. (June 10, 2024), https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/richardson-institute/blogs/growing-up-in-front-of-a-camera-the-worrying-trend-of-family-influencers-documenting-every-second-of-their-childrens-upbringings.
[7]Are There Laws About Child Influencers in Minnesota?, White & Assocs. (last accessed Oct. 15, 2025), https://www.whiteandassociateslaw.com/2025/09/30/are-there-laws-about-child-influencers-in-minnesota/.
[8] Cal. Fam. Code § 6651 (Deering 2025).
[9] Id.
[10] Cal. Fam. Code § 6653 (Deering 2025).
[11] See 820 Ill. Comp. Stat. Ann. 206/95 (LexisNexis 2025); see also Utah Code Ann. §34-23-501 (LexisNexis 2025).
[12] Minn. Stat. § 181A.13 (2025).
[13] Id.
[14] Id.
[15] Lincoln Roch, New Minnesota Law Regulates Minors’ Roles in Social Media Content, TCA News Serv., (July 18, 2025), https://www.proquest.com/docview/3231134098?accountid=14586&parentSessionId=JlPr4S9uchgDcvN7A%2BdCHqSf05dj5Rfi6wc04Ot5nP0%3D&sourcetype=Wire%20Feeds.
[16] Minn. Stat. § 181A.13 (2025).
[17] Id.
[18] Minn. Stat. § 181A.03 (2025).
[19] See Minn. R. 9505.0015 (defining gross income as “all earned income before any deduction, disregard, or exclusion”); see also Minn. Stat. § 290.01 (citing to the Internal Revenue Code definition of gross income, which is as follows: “compensation for services, including fees, commissions, fringe benefits, and similar items”).
[20] How Much Do Content Creators Make? Insights from 250 Creators for 2025, Blavity Inc. (Dec. 17, 2024), https://blavityinc.com/how-much-do-content-creators-make/#:~:text=Platform%20Payouts:%20Programs%20like%20TikTok,tailored%20to%20their%20audience%27s%20needs.
[21] Id.