When Your Age Bites Back

On Tuesday, December 10, or a few days prior to that, Emiko Hosokawa, the chairwoman of Studio Emiko, got involved in another age-related issue with Discord – the first time after an incident that barred her from Discord for much of the first half of 2022. Specifically, her VTuber talent Ciel Chandelleur befriended another VTuber on Bluesky and joined their Discord community – only to later find out that the community, as well as the VTuber themselves, has an 18+ target audience demographic after an accidental reveal of Hosokawa’s real age at that time resulted in her being kicked and banned from their community and apparently severing ties with Hosokawa and her ventures.

While the Discord website has an age requirement of 13 in most jurisdictions, many jurisdictions, particularly in Hosokawa’s home country of Vietnam, raise the requirement to between 14 and 16 years of age, usually due to censorship laws or child privacy concerns. Many critics have argued that this is a form of discrimination, but this is not the case. Parents and politicians have stated age requirements are necessary to prevent children from being exposed to content that is inappropriate for their age or to protect them from pedophiles. In 2019, YouTube removed comments from over 20 million videos containing minors to stop users from posting timestamps of minors in compromising positions.

To rub salt on the wound, a day later she found out that Virtual 7, a Thai VTuber agency, is going to recruit a 9-year-old child as a VTuber talent. Coupled with the Discord community ban fiasco she just experienced, Hosokawa is worrying that her career image – either her own solo career or the career of her VTuber talent (s) would be damaged due to her personal incident with accidentally joining an R18 community, plus the accusations of her being involved in child labor – especially when she first unofficially launched her VTuber venture before she turns 18 in May 2025 despite her statements stating that the aforementioned venture is not for profit. It wasn’t until yesterday that Virtual 7 canceled the decision to hire such a person that young to conform to child labor laws, which makes it illegal to have a minor work for monetary gains.

VTubing companies wishing to create channels featuring a child actor would need to take extra precautions. The first step would be to set the channel as “for kids”. When this feature was set up in early 2020 before the pandemic, comments and live chat would be disabled to prevent pedophiles from engaging in predatory behavior toward the VTuber, as well as make the channel more COPPA compliant. This is also true if the channel does not target children as the primary audience but still targets children based on factors such as subject matter or feature content such as characters, themes, toys or games, and other material that is popular with children.