SHARENTING: A STUDY ON INSTAGRAM POSTS OF INFLUENCER PARENTS IN TÜRKİYE

The rights of children are protected under both national and international law. However, children’s rights are violated both in real life and in the virtual environment with the development of new digital technologies and the widespread use of social media. Although these violations are mostly committed by people who are not relatives of the child on social networks, they can also be committed by the child’s father or mother on the part of the phenomenon or behavior of sharenting. Instagram is one of the most common environments where sharenting behavior, which refers to parents’ regular and detailed sharing of their children on social media, is exhibited. From this point of view, this study aims to reveal how influencer parents in Turkey exhibit sharenting behavior on Instagram and how they violate their children’s rights. Content analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. The population of the study consists of influencer parents who have Instagram accounts in Turkey. The sample consists of 3 Influencer parent accounts with over 300 thousand followers on Instagram, selected by purposive sampling method. According to the results obtained in the research, influencer parents perform sharenting behavior by sharing their children intensively. In the posts involving children, parents have caused their children to be stripped of their right to be forgotten, left digital footprints, violated their privacy, made them vulnerable to abuse and used as advertising material.