Sharenting in Digital Society: Exploring the Prospects of an Emerging Moral Panic

ABSTRACT

Debates about the risks of sharenting (the practice of parents or guardians sharing information about their children online) are gathering storm in global media reports and academic discourse. This paper analyses media representations of the practice and its risks to examine whether the attributes of a moral panic can be detected. Results reveal the presence of the attributes and the reductive depiction of sharenting risks and harms as the products of situational factors, specifically the sharenters’ agency. The paper critiques this finding and argues that a consideration of broader structural conditions marked by the power and ability of social media platforms to structure information flow and diffusion is required. This is necessary to contextualize and advance understanding of risks associated with new and emerging digital cultures such as sharenting which do not necessarily constitute criminal acts but are depicted as transgressive or deviant by the media due to the capacity of embedded practices to produce crimes and broader harms.

Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback during the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Affordances (Bloomfield, Latham, and Vurdubakis 2010) in this context refer to the opportunities provided by social media platforms to anyone with a compatible device (e.g., a smartphone) to broadcast their discursive expressions to an audience.

² These comprised news articles from Australia, British Columbia, Canada, China, Ireland, Canada, Ghana, Kenya, Latin America, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, UK, and the US.

³ To improve the presentation and legibility of the extracts, we used ellipsis in brackets ([…]) to merge quotations relating to the same issue.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the UK ESRC, project ‘ProTechThem: Building Awareness for Safer and Technology-Savvy Sharenting’, [ES/V011278/1]

Notes on contributors

Pamela Ugwudike

Pamela Ugwudike is Professor of Criminology at the University of Southampton. She is also a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and her research focuses on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence systems and strategies for remediating the harms associated with such technologies.

Anita Lavorgna

Anita Lavorgna is Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton (where she was previously Associate Professor of Criminology). Anita has led several research projects pivoting around cybercrimes and digital social harms, and her work is mostly based on interdisciplinary approaches.

Morena Tartari

Morena Tartari is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Padova. Currently, PI of the project Re-Green, Morena was postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southampton for the project ProTechThem, and Former Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Antwerp.