Danielle Bregoli, the “cash me ousside girl,” appeared on Instagram Live on Sunday, mugging for her iPhone camera. She pursed her lips and flicked her tongue, gazing steadily at her viewers, who encouraged her to “twerk,” “show tits,” and “blow me, girl.”

“Cleavage,” someone commented, referring to the image of Bregoli’s breasts spilling out of her low-cut tank top. “We need a threesome,” another commenter remarked. “Is this Brazzers?” someone asked, meaning the heavily trafficked porn site. Bregoli, who is 13, has shot to fame on a normalizing wave of the sexualization of children online. She represents a disturbing new trend: an underage girl who is treated like a porn star on social media.

“Cash me ousside, how bow dah?”, Bregoli’s catchy catch-phrase, arose out of her appearance last September on The Dr Phil Show. “Out-of-control teens” are a Dr. Phil convention, and Bregoli was billed as a doozy, a “car-stealing, knife-wielding, twerking 13-year-old,” pictured having physical altercations with mother, Barbara Ann Peskowitz. When audience members laughed at the girl’s blackfaced bravado (her white-girl rendition of being “from the streets” has sparked a number of outraged think pieces), she challenged them to take it outside. An Internet meme was born, and a social media career for a Boynton Beach, Florida, girl from modest circumstances.

Bregoli now has more than eight million followers on Instagram, where she can be seen doing endorsements for the inevitable Fit Tea (a “weight loss tea” regularly pedaled by the Instafamous). Reportedly she has a reality show in the works, and her mother has hired a manager. But what accounts for Bregoli’s soaring appeal, in contrast to the countless other “out-of-control teens” Dr. Phil has brought on television to admonish over the years?

The answer becomes clear in a YouTube video posted in February which has gotten over three million views. It shows Bregoli lying on a bed, wearing just a bra and sweatpants, slapping her behind and suggestively panting: “Ass so fat, how bow dah?” Then she’s twerking, then placing a bottle in between her breasts.

Some of the unprintable comments on this video gleefully celebrate pedophilia. Some of the commenters react to this in disgust, while others justify enjoying the 13-year-old Bregoli’s sexualized display: “See, I’m 14, so like I have no pedophile problem in here, I can smash,” or have sex. “Waiting for the sex tape,” someone observes.

Unfortunately Bregoli is no outlier when it comes to social media culture. Being hot is a #goal, sometimes for very young girls. Her videos and selfies may tend toward the extreme on the spectrum, but are similar in kind to those that exist all over the Internet.

Such postings are sometimes solicited by predators, such as the Australian man who was arrested this month for allegedly obtaining explicit images of children by posing as the singer Justin Bieber, using mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Skype. And sometimes such images are freely self-generated as a way to get attention, because being sexually provocative is often what is rewarded on social media.

“If you post a picture winning the math award, people will laugh at you, but if you post a picture in a bikini you’ll get like a hundred likes,” a girl I spoke to in Los Angeles summed it up. And social media is all about the likes, and the number of views and followers – followers girls often don’t even know.

Many girls are as troubled by the sexualization of girls on social media as their parents would be, if they were fully aware. And some girls have told me that posting provocative photos is their feminism, because they are sex-positive. That’s what Kim Kardashian says, after all, when she posts a nude selfie – it’s feminism.

And many girls look up to Kim as a role model in the digital age. She’s a successful businesswomen, the argument goes – look how rich and famous her sex tape and nude selfies have made her, and look how many Instagram followers she has (over 95 million). And now girls can develop FOMO over the life of Cash Me Ousside Girl.

Meanwhile, sexualization hurts girls. The landmark 2007 American Psychological Association report on the sexualization of girls draws connections between sexualization and a host of problems, from anxiety to depression to eating disorders to low self-esteem. Not to mention the fact that sexualized posts by children often border on child porn, and there is a problem with the proliferation of child porn all over the world.

What should be done about children posting sexualized photos and videos of themselves? What is the responsibility of social media companies? And how should the law respond? Until society catches up with this new technology, parents are the first line of defense. It’s time for parents everywhere to take control of their out-of-control teens, for their own well-being and protection.