China child influencers slammed for ‘distorting values’ in staged online videos

A three-year-old girl is fed extensively by her parents leading her to weigh as much as 35kg from eating hearty meals in front of a camera as a live-streamer. A young boy and a girl of his age are presented as a couple and perform intimate exchanges onscreen. Another young boy is filmed eating live worms and snails.

These unsettling scenes are from viral videos featuring so-called online celebrity children, a group which emerged years ago but has triggered controversy in the meantime.

In early July, state media CCTV criticised the chaotic development of this online group, throwing its problematic content into the spotlight.

Besides the above three clips, the media also cited two video segments by child bloggers. One showed a young boy being encouraged by a man to enter a women’s changing room. “You don’t have to shoulder legal liability since you are only a juvenile. Even if you sexually harass girls, they still have to bear that,” the man told the boy.

In the other clip, a boy was caught by a woman for peeking through the door in a woman’s toilet. He justified himself by saying he had not broken the law because he was a child.

The videos circulated widely online before being removed from the website under a newly promulgated Classification Measures for Online Information that May Affect the Physical and Mental Health of Minors.