New Illinois law protects money children earn as social media influencers

Statement

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"I'm not, no."

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"Well, Shreya was the starting point.

She sent a letter, and it came to my office. And so my staff read this. And I have younger staff that do pay attention to this. And they came to me and said: "This is important. You need to pay attention to this."

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"This sets up some parameters.

It says, if a child is in a certain portion of videos and the money is received from that, they get to have a certain part of that money set aside in a trust fund so that, when they turn 18, they can realize some of the fruits of their labor.

The enforcement of this -- and this is what I think the simplicity of it is -- is not with the state of Illinois. We have too much we can't handle already. So this really is a right of legal action. So, when a child turns 18, they can look back and they can say, yes, my parents used me in videos all throughout my childhood and made lots of money, but I have nothing.

So they have a right to then take legal action and recover some of that."

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"This is pretty pervasive, that some families use this as a business, really generating a lot of money.

When their child does unique things, they are able to maximize the profit of this. So we set this up really as a child labor law."

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"Originally, we had in the law that the child upon becoming adult could look back and could remove any unwanted video that they had on the Internet.

Technologically, that's difficult to do. We are going to be working with the attorney general in Illinois to see how we can deal with this as a privacy and consumer protection part. Technologically, it's a little difficult. I don't quite comprehend how you do that.

But we're going to give it an attempt."

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"We had Shreya testify in person. We had a young woman from Washington state, Chris McCarty, who has been following this issue in that state. She testified by video.

These two young people did a tremendous job. They just kind of blew the committee away. We passed this into the Senate unanimously."

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"And so I learned that we're in good hands. The next generation is surely fit to continue on and make progress."

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"Thank you."

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