Dads Talk Taking Their Kids’ Faces Off Social Media (Exclusive)

One couple is navigating the online privacy debate after finding their kids’ faces reshared online.

Bryan Lambillotte is a dad to two, and he and his husband, Chris, have been sharing their journey through parenthood from the very beginning.

The couple, who met in 2011 on a dating app, began their journey as parents during the pandemic when they made the decision to begin looking for a surrogate.

“We always wanted to have a family,” Bryan tells PEOPLE exclusively. “We really wanted to expand our family and our family’s bloodline and have children who were biologically related to us. And so from the whole process, from start to finish for our surrogacy journey took almost about two and a half-ish years.”

Throughout those two and a half years, Bryan made the decision to begin sharing their family journey with the internet, creating a joint couples account to document the highs and lows of finding a surrogate as a gay couple.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of positive representation, visibility when it came to surrogacy, when it came to IVF,” he explains. “We didn’t have a lot of resources that were, I guess under the social media umbrella to try and understand it a little bit better as well from other families that had gone through it. So we were kind of just doing everything firsthand and learning as we go.”

“Our journey was not smooth by any means,” Bryan insists. “We had a lot of delays, we had a lot of setbacks. Through our surrogacy agency, it took a total of two egg donors and three surrogates to finally get pregnant due to multiple reasons. And as hard as some of those moments were, I’m glad that I shared those because a lot of people think surrogacy, it’s an easy thing…It’s not as easy as it may look.”

Thankfully, the pair welcomed their twins, Brecon and London, in March 2022. After taking their social media following through the surrogacy journey, Bryan decided he wanted to continue to share his journey into fatherhood with them. And his story has resonated with many, as his TikTok account currently sits at 2 million followers.

“Men are capable of being nurturing, are capable of being patient and can love unconditionally and can be at home, and that’s completely fine,” he says. “And that was one of the reasons why I was like, I feel like I want to start sharing my fatherhood journey now that I am a dad, to show that we can do this and that it’s okay.”

Though the account originally started as a couple’s account, sharing Bryan and Chris’s joint journey into parenthood, it’s now solely under Bryan’s name. While the dads collaborated on raising their two kids, Bryan filmed and shared pieces of the journey with the followers who had been with them from the beginning.

How much they shared with the internet has always been a collaborative decision – even if Bryan was the one managing the social media accounts. He says the pair have always tried to strike a balance between what should be put online and what should be kept “just for us”

“There have been times where Chris has said, ‘You know what? I think this is something that I’d like to keep just us,’ “ he shares. And I completely and totally respect that… Not everything has to be documented and not everything has to be shared with our communities.”

Despite sharing their journey as parents for more than five years, Bryan recently made the decision to stop sharing his kids’ faces with his audience – even going as far as to remove old content that showed their faces.

“I was kind of surprised at how much backlash and negativity and just hurtful words were said when I decided to make that change, which kind of just validated my thoughts and feelings about [the] need to make this change,” Bryan shares.

He says a big factor in the decision was when he discovered that hundreds of hours of his content had been stolen and reposted – much of which contained his children’s faces. It took some time, but he and his team slowly had the accounts stealing his work removed, though he says new ones are always cropping up.

“When all of that unraveled, it just pushed me to say, you know what? Now is the time. You’ve been wanting to do this for a while,” he continues. “But I didn’t really know how to go about it and how to manage it all. I guess, if I’m being honest, part of me did think, well, what are people going to think now that I’m changing things up? And I had to get over that hurdle.”

Bryan recounts how he was met with a significant amount of backlash from those who viewed his videos when he announced London and Brecon’s faces no longer would be included in the content he posted going forward. He’s also been working to remove all of the previous content that included their faces, despite some pushback from his viewers.

“Obviously, the focus [of the content] was on me, but my kids were involved to help tell that story and show and bring that visibility and representation to it. But in the back of my mind, I always knew – I was like, at some point I’m going to want to make that switch and provide more privacy for my kids,” Bryan says.

Though plenty of creators have said they view their social media accounts as a sort of virtual diary, especially for those sharing moments as personal as parenthood, Bryan insists he’s not afraid of deleting old content to protect the privacy of his children, because “it’s never been about [the views].”

“Do you still hear and see my kids in content from time to time? Absolutely. But I make sure that the POV and the way my content is done is different,” he continues. “So that way the focus does stay on me, but people can still feel inspired and still learn from me, from my fatherhood experiences or from my parenting and positive parenting moments, but not having my kids forward facing and in the forefront of the camera with me.”

He says he’s always tried to implement some sense of privacy for his children, even when his followers asked for more. Brecon and London’s potty training journeys, for example, were something he found viewers asking for details about, but he says he wouldn’t post content that showed them going through, only with himself “facing the camera and just speaking to them as if it was a FaceTime.”

“Sometimes as a content creator, we get lost, sometimes lost in the ways of wanting to share or to produce content. We think it would be really beneficial and really great when in fact, no, this can be just us,” he cautions.

Father’s Day also included more “just us” moments with their twins, celebrating Chris, specifically. Bryan says they decided early on in their time as parents to separate the parent-centric holidays, celebrating Bryan’s parental contributions on Mother’s Day and Chris’s on Father’s Day so they each had their own individual holiday.

“I feel like Chris and I fulfill both roles,” he says. “We wanted to split our celebration so one could be honored on one day and one can be honored the other day, I thought that was a really great idea. And we’ve done that now the last three years since the kids were born.”