Like most of us, you probably never heard of Tattle Life up to a week ago. A gossip forum founded seven years ago mainly dedicated to vivisecting female celebrities and influencers, justified by the age-old notion that she who makes a living in the public sphere is asking for it.
Its big idea was to declare war on the mother of all easy targets: social media influencers, usually women. Distinguished by Nobel-worthy make-up artistry and gazelle-type bodies, they speak the language of feverishly busy grassroots mums, yet present as immaculately groomed and camera-ready, primed to endorse everything from skincare, swishy hair, food and fast fashion to “medical” advice, fertility clinics and baby slings.
It’s only a couple of weeks since TikTok finally banned the search word “Skinnytok”, an influencer-led hashtag directing users towards content that “idolises extreme thinness”.
Benign, life-enhancing, harmful or simply entertaining, influencers are marketing strategists, content creators, lighting experts and advertising executives. Businesswomen, in short, often selling the dream of motherhood itself.
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What they offer is little different from what was once the staple of women’s magazines – except in a few respects. Their numbers have exploded, they’re churning out the content several times a day and that content is their lives. And there is no shortage of people who are awed, curious, envious or furious about those lives. Two-thirds of UK millennials and more than eight in 10 of the UK’s generation Z said they followed influencers in a 2023 Statista survey and it’s a fair bet that some of them contributed to Tattle Life’s influencer vivisections.
No one ever went broke underestimating the savagery of a SuzyStarpie on a gossip site, especially about parenting and children. Typical Tattle Life comments: “Disgusting vapid selfish woman who’s [sic] opinion of herself is overinflated much like her daughter’s stomach”; “Lying unfit excuse for a mother”.
But it’s a vicious circle. Influencing can become a significant source of income, so it’s hardly surprising that, as their offline lives adapt to new partner or new babies, influencers draft them in as hot online content, with inevitable consequences.
One influencer told Jen Hogan that she was very upset that the trolls write about her children all the time, call them horrific names and even screenshot their images.
Some will nod despairingly at the idea of such gratuitous nastiness towards innocents. For others, it will cause more head-scratching. What kind of pressure impels a parent to send fully identifiable pictures of their children into the public gaze? Why post irretrievable images of little ones into a world often sinister, watchful and technologically capable of capturing them on the digital fringes forever?
A charming picture of Simon Harris posing with his little son before a preschool event posted on LinkedIn, a professional networking platform, didn’t stay there; it was forwarded to me on another platform. The fact that Harris’s home has been targeted by protesters might imply a greater defensiveness around family images, but as a keen social media user, perhaps he takes a more philosophical view of the unavoidably surveillance-riddled world we now inhabit and refuses to be intimidated by it.
Or perhaps he thinks of social media primarily as the glue that binds us all to our communities, old friends and distant family branches and is therefore worth defending? Either way, is it our place to tell any parent to take their children private for fear of being seen, however unfairly, as props of one kind or another ?
Some think so. Last year, France adopted an anti-sharenting law that enshrines the protection of children’s privacy on social media as a parental duty. It also gave judges the right to ban influencers from posting their child’s image altogether. Combine the facts that a 13 year old already has an average of 1,300 images of themselves circulating on the internet and the Australian study that found that about half of paedophilic images online (of the 45 million they looked at) were sourced from social media, many initially posted by parents, and you see the extent of the problem.
Parents who share are not rare. A 2017 UK Ofcom survey found that 42 per cent regularly posted or shared images of their children; only 15 per cent were worried about what their children might think about the shared content when they’re older. Will it bother them as grown-ups that a chain of data exists attached to them and how it will be used by the most powerful companies on earth?
How many of us could have predicted five years ago that, in a sleepy Spanish town in 2023, a group of local boys could use an AI computer app to convincingly strip naked 28 fully clothed girls aged between 11 and 17 and circulate them on WhatsApp and Telegram?
Or that, in April, a 31-year-old Co Antrim man would be charged with producing pornographic images of a child (or in plain language, images of the sexual assault of a child) using deepfake technology, as well as possessing an image of extreme child sexual assault. They included babies under one.
No one can tell us where the grotesque capabilities of dark AI and deepfakes will land us, still less the dangers of identity theft and digital kidnapping.
If France’s anti-sharenting law sounds annoyingly like the nanny state (literally) in action, it’s only a start in terms of the unknown unknowns. Everyone – not just influencers – should know that by now.
