Refinery 29
Why do celebrities put emojis on their children’s faces? It’s complicated
If you – like me – are obsessed with celebrity culture and therefore follow a lot of famous people on Instagram, your feed on any day can include: Mindy Kaling dancing with a can of Campbell’s soup, Blake Lively wearing heels like they were designed using Microsoft Paint, and Reese Witherspoon desperately trying to make a meme challenge (starring herself!) happen. Among all this strange online behavior, however, there is a phenomenon that stands out to me as being extremely strange, and is courtesy of famous parents: covering a child’s face with an emoji. You know you’ve seen it: Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik used a Hulk emoji to block their son’s face on Halloween; Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard put rainbows on their daughters’ faces when posting vacation photos; Ashley Graham placed a heart over her baby’s face in a video collage recapping her first 12 months of life; Best-selling author Jenny Mollen and wife of actor Jason Biggs, loves the “lighted” emoji for pictures of her children playing at home. Danielle Fishel does it, Michelle Buteau does it and Elsa Pataky does it. As well as Orlando Bloom, Jenna Dewan and Chris Pratt. (The list goes on, but I’ll stop there.) What makes this phenomenon so interesting is that many of the celebrities who use emojis, it seems, to put a privacy barrier around their children, are also the type to share apparently every other aspect of their lives with their fans and followers. Bell, for example, built her entire personal brand based on her ability to understand – and that includes how she presents her life as a mother. She regularly goes to talk shows and podcasts to discuss the funny antics her children have been doing and publishes detailed reports on how hard she works in her marriage. But showing the children’s faces is a line that she will not cross. When she posts a photo of her children on social media, she always covers their faces with an emoji. When someone already shares so much of your life and your children’s lives with the world, why exactly is your child’s face where they decide to set a limit? See this Instagram post A post shared by kristen bell (@kristenanniebell) According to Leah Plunkett, digital privacy law expert and author of Sharenthood: Why we should think before talking about our kids online, hiding their son’s face on social media, posts provide some specific privacy benefits. She explains that when it comes to who will learn the information from a photo you share, there are two broad categories. “The first is what other people – like humans and not algorithms or robots – can learn from the image,” she says. “The second is what data can be extracted, used and reused by various forms of machine learning or artificial intelligence, etc.” Blurring a face in an image can limit the information that real people can obtain from that image, but it is still unclear how much it protects against institutions such as social media companies and third parties who receive data from these social media companies by obtaining information from Image. “It would certainly be a protection against the kind of scenario that The New York Times wrote about in the fall of 2019, when it found that the photos that parents posted of children online in the early 2000s were taken and used to train what times call ‘cutting-edge surveillance technology’ ”, explains Plunkett. “Obviously, if you don’t have a face, the image can’t be used for that, but would it still be possible to learn things from the photo like the location or type of clothing used or depending on the photo, race or ethnicity or gender? Yes, it probably would still be. “For all of this, this tactic is not a foolproof solution for containing information, but for parents – and perhaps especially celebrity parents – some coverage is better than none, especially if they just can’t stop posting photos online. Although Plunkett confirm that it is safer to simply not share photos of your children on social media, she understands that the urge to do so can defuse some security fears. share about your life, of which children are a big part for most parents, certainly for me, without giving information about their children that, in a sense, is not yours to give, “explains Plunkett.” It’s like, here it’s what’s happening in my life, in which my kids are a big part, but literally and metaphorically, I’m not going to give you a window into their lives. ” So for celebrities who are used to – and love – sharing their lives on social media, it’s not really an option not to post pictures of their children, instead it’s about controlling the way they do it. In the age of social media , celebrities have and don’t have authority over their images. On the one hand, they have a direct line with their fans through platforms like Instagram, where they can shape and manipulate their personas – as long as they give at least a veneer of authenticity. On the other hand, they still have to turn away from the paparazzi, who are more zealous than ever in their search for celebrity photos, who then proliferate over the internet. Many stars found themselves in lawsuits for posting paparazzi photos without giving due credit or payment for those who photographed them. But while famous people have no control over paparazzi or their children’s images, they do have control over their own photos and can use them to cultivate change their own brands. Like everything we post online, posting photos of our children, whether their faces are visible or not, is a way for parents – famous or not – to convey a certain message about them and their lives. It is also a great way to generate engagement. Plunkett remembers when she was running for public office during the summer and posted a picture of herself filling out forms to enter the vote. In the photo, her daughter can be seen, although her face is not visible. “I thought about sharing this photo or not because, on the one hand, I’m really a very minimalist or non-existent ‘sharent’. On the other hand, part of the reason why I was running for office was because I think there should be a mother of children working in that position, ”explains Plunkett. “This was a private moment because it happened at my home, but it is also public because, in a non-COVID world, I would have to go to State House in New Hampshire and fill it out in front of anyone else who happened to be there. Also, I wanted to convey to the people who were getting to know me and getting to know the campaign, this is what it looks like to do this with a small child hanging from you. ”Finally, Plunkett decided to post the photo because his daughter was indistinguishable from any other small person with brown hair – the image was particularly well received by people in the community. It doesn’t matter if you are a celebrity, an influencer or just a normie parent, sharing photos of your kids almost guarantees more likes. Images that provide a unique view of your life – or at least the illusion of a view of your life – perform better on social media. Anyone who has ever reluctantly posted a selfie just to get infinitely more attention for it than any sunset or sandwich photo you’ve posted previously knows that this is true. For people who use their platforms professionally and are constantly thinking about engaging to get partnerships or just strengthening their personal brands, it makes sense that they want to share undeniably cute photos, even if they don’t reveal their kids’ faces. See this post on Instagram A post shared by ASHLEYGRAHAM (@ashleygraham) But perhaps the strangest aspect of emoji face coverage is that, well, they look really disturbing when used in accounts where aesthetics are a big focus – me , for example, I find it so aesthetically unpleasant that I know I cannot be alone. Perhaps, if you are a normal person, the presence of a wandering emoji in the middle of a family portrait may not stand out among all the other dimly lit photos of your week’s meal preparation or the countless photos of your cat that make up your grid. But in the profile of a celebrity, where each image is deliberately planned, and often curated by assistants or even agencies dedicated to transmitting a certain persona to the celebrity through photos, moments and memes (yes, we are talking about Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling), well, these emojis work differently. The posts are well planned and the grids are organized, and yet, there’s a heart or a pumpkin right in the center of everything, an absolute distraction. Some celebrities get around this cartoon intrusion by posting pictures only where their children are facing away from the camera. Still others bend, blurring their children’s faces as if they were in an episode of Police. Even considering and understanding the perspective of privacy, it is still difficult, after seeing the photo of Zayn and Gigi holding their little Hulk packet to avoid going into an existential pirouette, and asking themselves: What’s in a face? Couldn’t it be argued that a person’s essence is in his face? So, without that, what exactly am I looking at? (And, if you’re thinking that I look like a first year philosophy student stoned debating what it means to be a person, believe me, I know – and I don’t like these posts to make me feel that way, or). However, in fact, the most important question I always ask myself after seeing another photo of a child wearing a random emoji, like a kind of macabre digital mask (an aesthetic nightmare that isn’t even as safe from a digital privacy perspective) is this: Why post the photo? The answer, I suppose, is that celebrities and influencers are still normal people, who, like the rest of us, have the same futile impulses to share too much. In fact, their impulses may be even stronger than ours, as they are literal artists on and off social media. But, they also know the power of the information illusion, and how nothing works better, in terms of maintaining audiences, than pretending to give more than it really is. Then, they fan their fan base, apparently offering a glimpse into their lives, while stepping back and asserting control over their own narratives. All of that is fine, but, you know, do they have to do this with these ugly emojis? Like what you’re seeing? How about a little more R29 goodness, right here? Dakota Johnson Loves Limes. Or is it? What is happening to Kylie Jenner’s water pressureHead Empty Just Vibes: How Bimbos took over TikTok