Sharing as displaying: Parents’ sharenting practices within conflictual separations

The emergent practice of sharing textual and audiovisual contents concerning underage children online by their parents or guardians, also known as sharenting, is part of emerging digital cultures, which are enabled by affordances provided by new media technologies. Based on data from a passive virtual ethnography of Facebook communities, this paper analyses the sharenting practices of parents involved in judicial litigations. While contributing to wider debates on doing and displaying family and controversial sharenting activities, results of this article show how sharenting is addressed in online communities by administrators and other users; how the privacy vs openness paradox about sharing information and contents concerning children’s involvement in judicial litigations is negotiated by parents and administrators; and how online and offline parenting cultures affect sharenting as a practice.