Dogs are into social media, so why not infants?
Parents are setting up Twitter accounts for their babies, sometimes at birth, hoping to give them "a little voice in the loud world of social media."
That's Today show correspondent Jenna Wolfe: at two weeks old, her daughter Harper Estelle has 6,505 Twitter followers and counting.
Lance Armstrong's kids Olivia and Max boast more than 14,000 followers combined. (Earth-shattering stuff off their feeds: "Hey everybody, check out my pretty dress!" and "I'm smirking … because … I can walk now!! Me like!!")
Unfollow forever, please.
Writing at NYMag.com, Joe Coscarelli explains that "Kid accounts – set up, maintained, and authored by parents – are becoming de rigueur thanks in equal part to everyday parental pride and tech-savvy paranoia."
The parents profiled in the article work in media, which may account for the insanity. Some ardently secure accounts for their somewhat famous kids, while others set them up to use as humble digital scrapbooks.
The feeds are filled by parents speaking in first person as their newborns, often employing baby speak. Maybe we can blame the viral Twitter account Honest Toddler for all this?
For some parents, though, baby's first Twitter is serious branding business: "It was just an intellectual capital investment," ESPN sports business reporter Darren Rovell told NYMag. He got his daughter a Gmail account and Twitter handle even before announcing her name. And he actually said this with a straight face: "I would argue that in some sense you become a brand the second you're born."
Readers have been unimpressed: "I have teenagers and trust me in 13 years these kids are going to be MORTIFIED," one writes. And another: "Narcissism by proxy."
Bingo.
Zosia Bielski