By Olivia Olander | Politico
A new Illinois law intended to ensure child social influencers receive a payout received praise from advocates when it was signed just over a week ago. But clear compliance could be a challenge in this new frontier of child labor law.
“There’s a really tricky burden that’s gonna get placed … on these content creators to either figure out whether or not this applies to them,” said Martin Kamenski, CEO of Chicago-based Revel CPA, which does accounting for creatives and influencers.
The law signed by Gov. JB Pritzker will allow child influencers to sue if a portion of their earnings aren’t set aside in a trust account. It’s modeled after similar laws for other child entertainers, but it’s the first of its kind for social media influencers.
According to the law’s text, it kicks in when at least 30 percent of monetized video “produced within a 30-day period included the likeness, name, or photograph” of the child.
The amount that needs to be contributed to a fund increases with how much the child appears in a video.
For example, “if a young person is in fifty percent of a video, then you have to set aside 25 percent of the money that’s received and put it into a trust fund,” Illinois state Sen. David Koehler said in an interview.
“The new law for compensating child social media influencers in Illinois is a positive stride in protecting young content creators’ earnings. This legal development takes on an even more nuanced perspective considering that it introduces a legal basis for a child to take legal action against their parent or guardian. However, practically implementing the law could pose a serious challenge due to the difficulty of accurately quantifying a child’s likeness, name or photograph in monetized videos. Nevertheless, the legislation signifies an important acknowledgment of the need to ensure equitable treatment and financial security for young influencers in the digital age.” -George Finn, Rose Law Group attorney
