Social Media and Children: A Critical Analysis of Youtube Channel “Babishko Family Fun TV”

As new media technologies infuse into society, digital capitalism gains power for commodification of everything. This process gained speed especially with the emergence of social media that is enabled by web 2.0 technologies. Children have been participating the digital reflection of capitalism both as audience and as commodities. Legal user age for social media platforms is thirteen. However, it is obvious that the average age of children both using and watching YouTube is much less than thirteen. In recent years children and adolescents, both as YouTuber and follower, have been using this platform without control and their development might be negatively affected. On the other hand, exposition of children in these kind of platforms might cause some situations, which are against children rights. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis method, this study aims to analyze “Babishko Family Fun Club” Youtube channel in terms of commodification of the childhood, children rights and promoting of children as followers to consumption. One aim of this study is to show out the capitalism-integrated structure of social media-child relationship. The other aim is about the possible loss children might experience, using social media. Parents are deepening the problem both by ignoring their children’s social media sharing in social media and by helping or supporting the children exposing themselves in YouTube and similar platforms. It is an emerging problem that about this issue, there are no informing, warning or when necessary, penalizing mechanisms aiming parents. This study is important for drawing attention to this problem