From YouTube to news: vulnerability and agency in the representations of children content creators

Abstract

This article originates from research that investigates the relationship between visibility, childhood and participation on the internet. This paper analyzes the representations of children youtubers in a sample of 43 pieces of news collected through an alert of Google searcher between 2017 and 2019. Based on understanding of news as a cultural product and on children's visibility as a social image of kids, this work’s methodology is based on the principles of content analysis. The partial findings indicate that the protagonism that kids have in social media, particularly on YouTube, is problematized by the analyzed news content, generating social repercussions that do not celebrate such protagonism, and also do not fail to recognize children as subjects.

Keywords
childhood and media; kidfluencers; children’s visibilities; child’s social image