A high school student in Bloomington-Normal is getting a real life civics lesson in her attempt to help other teens who produce online content.
University High School student Shreya Nallamothu, 15, has been working on an independent study since August 2022 to help child influencers. Nallamothu defined child influencers as any underage child with a social media channel, not just children of family vloggers.
Those children can accumulate millions of followers on TikTok, YouTube and other social media outlets, and they can make big bucks off of those followers.
Nallamothu said she started her study with future legislation in mind.
“I definitely wanted to create policy and legislation around child influencers because I felt like Illinois could be kind of a trend setter and a precedent setter for this issue,” she said.
Nallamothu said she spent the majority of her study conducting research on child influencers in order to write a legal memo. With the help of her independent study advisor, U-High teacher Morgan Schmidt, Nallamothu drafted the memo and sent it to state Sen. Dave Koehler, a Democrat from Peoria whose district includes Bloomington-Normal. Nallamothu was able to communicate with Koehler and his staff on the bill's wording.
Nallamothu said her main goal with the study was to put mechanisms in place so that the child influencers can access money generated once they turn of age.
The child vloggers bill requires so-called kidfluencers to be accurately compensated. They are not protected by existing child labor laws.
“A lot of the time (the child influencers) are being forced by their parents to appear in videos, but then because they’re a minor they don’t have access to any of that money,” said Nallamothu.
The bill passed unanimously in the Illinois Senate on March 29.
“This new digital era has allowed children to find ways to make money online from the content they make,” Koehler said in a statement. “The problem is that many parents take this opportunity to pocket the money themselves and encourage their children to make more content for their benefit. This is a child labor issue that didn’t exist 10 years ago.”
Now it has been moved to the Illinois House. State Rep. Sharon Chung, a Bloomington Democrat, is the bill’s House sponsor. The measure awaits a hearing in that chamber.
Nallamothu said she hopes other states will follow Illinois, and wants to see the bill on a national scale.
