Why I Stopped Posting Pictures of My Kids Online

If you're looking for a New Year's resolution, here's one.

As a new mom in the early 2010’s, I spent plenty of time posting pictures of my kids on Facebook and Instagram. My kids were young and adorable. I could easily share pictures with out-of-town family and friends while keeping a digital scrapbook for myself. These were the early days of Instagram. If there was a downside to all of this, I was oblivious to it.

But, as time went on, I realized that instead of taking one picture of my kids and putting my phone away, I was taking multiple pictures, trying to get that just right shot. Parents, you know the one… the photo which perfectly captures how adorable, funny and endearing your children are. The one where people would slow their scroll and leave a like or comment. Soon enough instead of posing for another picture, my kids would hide behind their hands or ask me to stop. I began obliging and then started wondering, “If I were a child today, would I want to grow up with thousands of pictures of me online that I could never have agency over? How, and at what age, do I explain this massive digital footprint that I’m creating to my sons?”

The Way It Used To Be

In my attic, I have shoeboxes and scrapbooks full of 4x6 photos from my own childhood. On occasion, it can be fun to go through the pictures and tell my children stories about growing up. But, some of these photos make me cringe - the awkwardness of my preteen years and those memories I had forgotten and don’t care to be reminded of. I am so thankful these images aren’t blanketed across the internet for the entire world to see. I simply close the shoebox and the time capsule is safe once again.

The Reality of the Day

Largely, I hadn't been creating a digital family scrapbook as much as I had been using my kids’ cute images to garner likes and comments. My time online was largely spent consuming other people’s content. If creating a family scrapbook was truly the goal, I had the hours to create one the old fashioned way. If the goal was to share updates with far away friends and family, I could put an end to my own social media consumption and easily have enough time in my week to make a phone call or write a note instead. In most cases, an annual Christmas card would suffice.

The more I stopped doing what was normal as a young mom, the more questions I had. I ended up deleting all of my photos off of social media and ultimately deleted my accounts altogether. As it turned out, my parents and siblings who lived across state lines wanted to see pictures of my kids, but nobody else really cared. My friends didn’t notice when I stopped posting images of my kids’ first days of school or birthday parties.

Digital Privacy is a Good Gift

I had decided: if I was growing up in today’s digital world, I would want a chance at digital privacy. So, why would I withhold that from my own children? I stopped posting my sons’ pictures online and quickly realized that also meant I stopped taking their pictures as frequently. Apparently, my drive to post on social media was stronger than my desire to capture a moment of time. Ugh. Being honest with myself doesn’t always feel so great.

To be fair, there are millions of pictures of kids online that are buried so deep in the cloud that digging up a childhood worth of photos one day might be well, virtually, impossible. But this still feels more exposed than shoe boxes shoved in the corner of a dusty attic. Plus, all of those photos in my attic cost me something: literal money. I paid cash to buy film and have the images exposed and turned into 4x6 physical copies. If I had to pay for pictures in the 1990’s, who was paying for it in the 2010’s?

Who Owns My Photos?

We don’t give it much thought, but there is a significant amount of electricity and physical servers that are required for the “the cloud” to work. Digital storage still has a tangible element that requires actual financial investment. Why are these apps willing to store all of our images and captions without charging us?

I know now that I’m not the only person who was thinking about these things. In her book, The Opt-Out Family, Erin Loechner chronicles walking away from over a million online followers, and a lucrative career, when she writes, “Take it from me: you can build a digital home on the borrowed real estate of any social platform. But you’ll never own it. It will never be yours.”

Did I really want my family photos, my digital scrapbook, to belong to Instagram or Facebook (now Meta)? Who is this company after all?

Loechner took a deep dive into Meta’s terms of use (you know, all of the legal mumbo-jumbo we agree to with the click of a button and never read). She had this to say,

Without your knowledge or consent, Instagram’s current terms of use grant Instagram permission to use any content at their discretion.

Well, that’s not what I was trying to do. I wanted to share pictures with friends, not hand over the rights of my images to Mark Zuckerberg.

The Worst of the Worst

All of the photos we post online go to advertisers and companies who are looking to market their products to us. We are so accustomed to advertising that it doesn’t bother us very much. But there’s another insidious element to social media photos that when it comes to kids, we can’t afford to ignore.

Consider this from the National Center for Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE),

Meta repeatedly claims to lead the industry in child online protection. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that so-called “safety measures” are not only ineffective, but that Meta actually facilitates harm – such as by providing access to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) with the “see results anyway” button for potential CSAM, and by algorithms that actually connect pedophiles to each other and to children’s accounts. Meta not only connects children to predators, Meta is itself a perpetrator.

Oh no. The company we use for our digital scrapbooking is a perpetrator of child sexual abuse material? NCOSE goes on to say, “Instagram is the #1 platform where perpetrators actually distributed sextortion images.”

Does that cute picture of potty training your son now make your stomach churn? Do images of your teenage daughter on a beach vacation, now cause you to break out in a cold sweat? Sadly, thanks to deepfakes, every image ever posted to the web can now be turned into CSAM.

Meta is arguably the biggest distributor of child pornography the world has ever seen. Attorneys General in all 50 states have taken action against this company. Meta is not a carefree place to host your family’s digital scrapbook.

What If…

Imagine taking your 35mm film to a local corner market that employs child sexual predators and regularly facilitates the sharing of sexually graphic photos of children. Would you want them to be the ones developing your family’s vacation photos? Knowing this was happening, would you hand over the negatives and an hour later pick up the 4x6 prints and never bat an eye? Would you even want to step foot in the store to buy a new toothbrush? I think not.

Dear Christian Parent, we have trusted one of the worst companies in human history with the images of our precious children and for what purpose? What have we gained that’s worth this risk? If all of this is utterly new to you, that’s okay, but don’t just sit on this information. May I suggest what I did:

1. Delete all of your social media pictures and strongly consider deleting your social media accounts.

2. Tell your friends, educate them, for the sake of their precious children too.

3. Don’t allow your churches or your schools to post pictures of your children to their social media accounts. When you do, Meta, not your well intentioned church youth ministry, owns these pictures.

4. Depending upon their ages, tell your children that you aren’t using these apps anymore because millions of precious children are being harmed.

5. Ask your churches, schools, community groups and sports teams to stop using social media to post pictures of people under 18.¹

We have normalized allowing a company to exploit children in the worst way possible because they don’t charge us any fees for their service. Christians, we need to reclaim our integrity. Images of kids online shouldn’t be the norm. We need to do better. Our precious, sweet children deserve it.

1. I do think there’s a way that social media use by adults, churches, or schools can be “okay.” I’ll be writing more on that in the coming months. I don’t see a way forward when it comes to images of children being on these platforms. Disagree? I’d love to hear why!