In France, a child can sue her parents for posting pictures of her on Instagram. On any social media network, in fact, it is the responsibility of the French parent to protect a child’s image. The Gendarmerie have even posted on Facebook about it: “Préservez vos enfants!” The law rests on the principle that the images you post of a non-consenting child will endure in the future, and thus may distress or shame the child in the years to come.

We all sort of know this, but brush it off as part of parents’ prerogative to embarrass their kids. Nobody thinks twice about posting a picture of their child throwing a tantrum, for example. Parents have always celebrated their children against their will, from the family photo album on the yuletide knee to the Facebook update.

But all social media platforms are not created equal, and the ones we favor are rapidly changing. In March, the Pew Research Center announced that 35 percent of U.S. adults now use Instagram, an increase of seven percentage points from 2016. Instagram is on a sharply upward trajectory in American culture, challenging, if not surpassing, Facebook as the central place where people perform their identities online.

At the end of 2017, I wrote that Instagram had served as an escape hatch from the awful reality of living in Trump’s America. But by the end of this year, Instagram has become something different. The app has become so dominant, so commercialized, and so lucrative for so many people, that the meaning of its content has changed, ethically compromising even those users who make not a dime from it. This is particularly true for those who post images of their children, since the publication of an intimate family photograph is so fraught with moral questions.

Instagram has become a place where images of children are swapped for cold, hard cash. This poses a multifaceted ethical predicament. If your child likes being photographed, but can’t understand what it means to be famous online, how do you interpret their wishes? Let’s say that your child doesn’t care either way, but your Instagram account gets popular enough that you get free stuff in exchange for your posts, which the child gets to enjoy. Would you be denying the child freebies that they’ve technically earned, because your own moral foibles got in the way? What if you don’t earn anything tangible, but feel like you have to keep posting in order to stay popular, relevant, or even just to seem like a good parent?