Motherhood influencers in the UK

The study draws on the privacy paradox to explore to what extent selected British social media influencers overstep their children’s privacy by sharing images of them online. We content analysed 5253 Instagram posts from ten major influencers in the UK and then collected self-reported data from the said influencers. By analysing actual sharing behaviour and relating it to self-reported perceptions of sharing behaviour, our study is the first systematic examination of actual sharenting behaviour in the British motherhood influencer industry. Images of children were featured in over 75% of the posts (3917), but the proportion of embarrassing, intimate and exposing content was relatively low (11.5%). Sponsorship and product advertisement appeared in 46.4% of posts featuring children which demonstrates that images of children are used for financial gain, most likely without informed consent. The popularity of posts varied but was not positively related to whether a post featured a child or not: posts with children did not attract more likes than posts without children. Influencers reported high awareness of their posting behaviour and high trust in online safety, suggesting that sharing images of their children is strategic rather than accidental. This study provides practical implications for motherhood influencers; specifically, the shared content does not need to cross privacy boundaries to gain popularity and engagement. Theoretically, the study does not offer strong support for the privacy paradox in this specific sample.