In one photo Rosie lounges on the ground, wearing a tight crop top, staring into the camera. In other photos she poses like a model, looking over her shoulder, pouting.
These images have been posted to an online platform where "fans" can subscribe for "exclusive" pictures of their favourite influencers.
Fans need to be over 18 to subscribe. In other words: adults only.
But Rosie is a child. She's only allowed on the platform because one of her parents manages the account.
Comments such as "beautiful", "bloody hot", "gorgeous", "so cute", "so attractive" or "babe" flood Rosie's page, often accompanied by fire or heart emojis. Many of these appear to be from men.
They tell her she has the body of a "goddess", compliment her "cute" feet, tell her they're "in love" with her and that they "want to see more".
Subscribers pay about $30 a month to see photos of Rosie and some pay even more to send her personal messages.
This is just one example uncovered by Four Corners where men are making inappropriate — and at times violent and sexual comments — about young girls.
Warning: The following story contains graphic details readers may find confronting.
Often the girls are child influencers – or "kidfluencers" – who are using social media for innocent reasons, like showing off their dancing skills or trying to secure brand deals.
But some of their accounts are being targeted by strangers who lust over them, make sexual comments on their pages and sometimes even download their images, exchanging them on other social media sites.
In the worst cases, children's photos are being downloaded and transformed into pornographic deepfakes, then uploaded into private chat forums.
Some parents Four Corners have spoken to feel resigned to live with this attention, seeing it as a price to pay for making their child a social media star.
Others appear to be actively courting the men to make money.
"There are many parents who know exactly what's going on," says Lyn Swanson Kennedy, who works with Collective Shout, a not-for-profit organisation that lobbies against the objectification of women and children.
"They wilfully turn a blind eye, justifying the means by the ends, whether it's fame or profit."
Four Corners is not publishing the real names or images of the children we describe in this story to protect their safety. "Rosie" is a pseudonym.
Parents selling 'exclusive' online access to their children
One of the sites enabling this sort of activity is BrandArmy.
Like OnlyFans, it allows people to start a channel and make money from subscriptions, tips, private messaging and live streams, but it doesn't allow nudity or sex on its platforms.
BrandArmy describes itself as a place for athletes, musicians, models and creatives to grow their brand and get paid.
It has allowed children aged 13 and over to have their own channels if they are managed and run by a parent.
Meanwhile, the people subscribing to these children's channels must be over 18.
Four Corners has found several children's accounts posted with suggestive captions and attracting inappropriate comments.
Among them are young Australian influencers with parent-run accounts, whose pages contain photos of the girls wearing tight clothes or swimsuits.
For a monthly fee, their subscribers get a "behind the scenes" look at the girls' lives, which includes photos, videos and other content.
For even more money, they can send the girls messages or unlock extra "exclusive" photos.
BrandArmy says it no longer allows children to sign up but Four Corners has found dozens of underage girls still on its platform.
Some international accounts offer shots of the girls wearing a bikini and riding a horse, wearing "short shorts", as well as doing dance stretches. They are also often littered with suggestive emojis, including winking or poking a tongue out.
After being shown Rosie's BrandArmy account, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant described it as "gross".
"This is a child," she said.
"This is selling and commodifying your child's innocence, and we're never going to be able to sterilise the internet. These images will follow this young woman throughout her life.
"That's [BrandArmy] profiting from exploitation and the sexualisation of children."
When Four Corners flagged accounts featuring sexualised content with BrandArmy, the company took them down.
BrandArmy declined to comment for this investigation but says on its website that it interviews the parents of junior account holders before they're given a channel and that it actively moderates the site.
Young girls getting 'sugar baby' requests on Instagram
BrandArmy is a small website, but one of the most popular social media sites in the world is also putting children at risk.
Many kidfluencer accounts on Instagram — usually young girls into dancing, modelling and gymnastics — are attracting unwanted, sexualised attention, Four Corners has found.
Even a cursory perusal of these types of accounts on Instagram shows men making sexual comments about the children's photos publicly.
A Sydney woman we'll call Kate, who ran her nine-year-old daughter's Instagram account to promote her acting career, told Four Corners she had to take a step back from posting after being bombarded with messages.
"Every day I get up in the morning and delete at least 15 to 20 accounts," she says.
"You can tell they are paedophiles. No-one is following them and they are only following young girls.
"I receive one or two direct messages a week asking, 'Can you dance for me' … 'Can you send pics of your feet'."
Others tried to start video calls.
Kate once reported a user who messaged saying "you look extremely beautiful and attractive" and asked if the nine-year-old would like to become his "sugar baby".
Instagram's parent company Meta responded to her complaint with: "Because of the high volume of reports that we receive, we couldn't review this chat".
Kate said she received that response to most of the inappropriate content she reported.
Like BrandArmy, Instagram allows followers to subscribe to accounts – which means for a fee, they can get exclusive content not available on their main channel.
In response to questions, Instagram told Four Corners it had recently stopped this feature when the focus of the account was children.
But Four Corners found multiple children's accounts were still taking subscriptions at the time of publication.
In response to the sexualised comments and messages on its platform, Meta said it had "developed a range of features that help people protect themselves from unwanted contact, including Hidden Words, which lets you filter comments and messages that contain certain phrases, as well as blocking and reporting".
Ms Inman Grant says parents need to think twice about giving their children public profiles.
"We're not going to put our kids in short shorts and midriff tops on a dark street corner in King's Cross in the middle of the night to see what kind of response they get from young men," she said.
"But we're doing the same in the online world where there are literally millions of people.
"We seem to think that there's a degree of safety because they're online, but there's just a different kind of harm."
Public children's photos found in private online channels
At its worst, that harm can be seen on encrypted chat channels, where obsessed fans discuss their favourite child influencers and share their social media pictures and videos.
Four Corners has found private chats where users share deepfake porn with young girls' faces superimposed on the bodies.
A user on one chat about a 15-year-old American child influencer shared an image the girl posted that day, and asked: "Is it me or [are] her parents … slowly [starting] to sexualise her a bit more? Like her post[s] are just a tiny bit more, like, revealing?"
A user responded: "I think so, they're content creators and they know that cute lil ones bring in a lot of views".
Dozens of posts have men referencing masturbating to her photos. Others upload photographs of their genitalia next to pictures of her face. Some users offer to pretend they are the girl in private messages with another user.
One user posted: "I need to see her in person, they live near me. I just saw the mom post the park near my house."
Other chats include violent rape fantasies, including thoughts of following a girl to school and abducting her.
Another encrypted chat channel dedicated to an Australian teenage dancer has more than 200 subscribers and is filled with pictures of her as a young child, with love-heart and banana emoji reactions, often used to represent male genitalia.
Paedophile 'hunting grounds' on social media
Making sexualised images of children, or sexual comments about them, can be deemed a criminal offence in Australia, says Commander Helen Schneider, who runs the Australian Federal Police unit tasked with fighting child exploitation.
"My warning to any individual who is talking in a sexualised way, or in a sexualised abusive way, about a child image, is that you are at risk of committing an extremely serious offence under Australian law," she said.
But some families Four Corners spoke to said when they had reported this content to their local police, they were told there was nothing they could do.
The eSafety Commissioner, who has civil powers under the Online Safety Act, can currently order child sexual abuse material to be removed.
In cases where suggestive content posted by parents could be considered sexualised but may not fit the definition of "child sexual abuse material", Ms Imnan Grant says it's difficult to take action.
She says the government could consider expanding the act so her office can deal with it.
"I think it's something that we should look at. It needs to be something that's effective, implementable and achievable," she said.
"The [platforms] are creating the hunting grounds on which these paedophiles are seeking out and sexualising our children, and worse, grooming and exploiting them."
Watch the Four Corners documentary, 'Kidfluencers', tonight from 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
Subscribe to the Four Corners newsletter and follow Four Corners on Facebook.
Contact Four Corners here.
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2024-05-19 18:42:11Z
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