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Meta allegedly turned to parenting influencers to soften its image on child safety amid criticism over its platform’s influence on minors, according to a new report.
The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), an American research hub, argues that Meta’s promotion of its Instagram “Teen Accounts” was part of a broader effort to influence the public conversation around platform accountability.
The report alleged that the company cultivated a network of hundreds of online creators and so-called “momfluencers” by inviting them to curated events promoting the new accounts.
Influencers then repeated the company’s talking points to their followers with some disclosures or hashtags indicating a paid partnership, the report said.
The report comes after Meta lost several US lawsuits alleging it failed to protect minors on its platforms. One case, filed by Raul Torrez, New Mexico’s Attorney General, alleged that Meta also failed to protect children from sexual exploitation.
Who has promoted Teen Accounts?
Teen accounts include built-in features for kids under 17 that limit unwanted contact and the display of harmful contentand also offer additional tools such as time management, according to Instagram.
Among those highlighted in the report is influencer and former Duck Dynasty star Sadie Robertson Huff, who praised Instagram’s Teen Accounts in a 2024 video post to her millions of followers.
“They have actually rolled out these new Teen Accounts that I think are absolutely incredible,” Robertson Huff said in the video, which had a disclosure of an Instagram partnership.
Influencers, including Alexia Delarosa, Noelle Downing, and reality television personality Leroy Garrett, were among those who publicly praised the Teen Accounts system after attending the events.
Euronews Next reached out to the influencers quoted in the report and Meta for comment, but did not receive an immediate reply.
Garrett defended his collaboration with Meta in comments to CNN, saying: “It’s vital that we all come together to navigate these issues and promote a safer online environment for our youth.”
Meta told CNN that it “proudly” works with creators and parents to spread awareness of its parental controls.
The TTP report said it also identified 11 doctors, psychologists and therapists who promoted the accounts. Another five doctors appeared at Meta’s events as speakers, which the report implies means they received a fee.
Among those identified were adolescent medicine specialist Dr Hina Talib and psychologist Dr Ann-Louise Lockhart, both of whom posted supportive messages about Teen Accounts while disclosing financial relationships with Meta.
Talib told TTP she had worked with Meta briefly on speaking engagements and a social media post, but said she insisted on using her own wording rather than company-provided talking points. Euronews Next independently reached out to Talib for her response.
The political battle over age verification laws
The investigation further claims Meta used influencers to support one of its major policy priorities: legislation requiring app stores operated by Apple and Google to handle age verification and parental approval for minors downloading apps.
Meta has argued that parents should have the option to approve or reject their children’s requests to download social media apps and that their age should be verified in the process.
The report said those influencers are being used as a “political astroturf operation to build support for bills that put the onus on app stores, not individual apps like Instagram, to verify the age of users.”
Experts previously told Euronews Next that app store-level verification falls short of creating a safer online experience for children because it does not address the systemic issues with social media apps, such as “addictive features” like infinite scroll.