The Tech Transparency Project is criticizing how Meta has paid Instagram influencers, including doctors, psychologists and college athletes with millions of followers, to promote Meta’s Teen Account safety features.
Meta has paid Instagram influencers, including doctors, psychologist and college athletes with millions of followers, to promote the social media company’s Teen Account safety features in a positive light, according to The Tech Transparency Project’s findings. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)
“The fact that Instagram is thinking about this for teens and trying to help parents have a peace of mind is amazing,” the post continued. It also featured a #MetaPartner tag — but buried at the bottom of the glowing endorsement is a small print disclosure that she has a paid partnership with Instagram.
The investigation also identified at least 11 doctors and psychologists with financial ties to Meta who publicly promoted the Teen Accounts, in some cases on television, without consistently disclosing those relationships.
“You have these influencers being paid to push what is essentially a faulty product in the first place,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project.
Meta promotes Teen Accounts as a safer Instagram experience for users ages 13 to 17, with content filters, screen time limits and parental supervision tools. The company has hosted what it calls Screen Smart events in cities across the country, where influencers collect branded swag and hear Meta’s messaging. Many of the posts that follow include a “paid partnership” label or hashtag. Some don’t.
One medical influencer, who spoke to TTP on background because they’d signed a non-disclosure agreement, said they felt “manipulated” after learning about the child safety lawsuits against Meta. They said Meta edited their script to remove language acknowledging social media’s negative effects on kids, before algorithmically boosting the post to millions of views.
Meta has also recruited influencer dads, like reality TV star Leroy Garrett, who has nearly 300,000 Instagram followers. He attended a Screen Smart event in Chicago in April 2026 and posted a paid endorsement of Teen Accounts. In a statement to CNN, he defended the arrangement: “Partnering with Meta allows me to contribute to this important conversation and advocate for the well-being of our children in the digital landscape.”
In a statement provided to KQED, a Meta spokesperson wrote, “Teen Accounts provide built-in protections for young people and give parents concrete tools to supervise their teens’ experience. We proudly work with parents and creators to spread the word about these controls and encourage people to use them.”
“Our critics claim to care about safety, but attacking efforts to educate parents proves they are more interested in headlines than actually helping families,” it continued.
The spokesperson also noted that partnering with influencers to raise awareness has become standard industry practice, pointing to similar arrangements at TikTok, Snap and Roblox.
Paul didn’t dispute that other platforms use influencer marketing. But she argued that Meta warrants particular scrutiny. Though Pew Research consistently shows YouTube leadings among teens, with TikTok second, Meta’s internal documents, surfaced through litigation, demonstrate how long the company has been aware of harms to children while choosing not to act. The Teen Accounts themselves, Paul asserted, were launched in 2024 largely by repackaging safety features that the company had already announced piecemeal in prior years — timed, she argues, to counter the momentum of lawsuits.
“It’s still just passing the buck on responsibility, rather than moderating the platforms and making them safe in the first place,” Paul said.
A Washington Post investigation found that Teen Accounts “fail spectacularly” to shield young users from content related to sex, alcohol and drugs. TTP’s own researchers found that searching a hashtag as simple as #fight from a Teen Account surfaced graphic content, the same type of content Meta explicitly claimed its filters would block.
Paul said Meta also needs to hire more human content moderators, rather than rely heavily on artificial intelligence for moderation. “Time and again, it’s a very small team of researchers, or in some cases journalists, that are easily, at a very basic level, able to surface these issues,” Paul said.
The stakes are rising. A trial pitting school districts against Meta and other social media companies is expected this summer, part of a wave of litigation that legal observers say will attempt to force Silicon Valley to take accountability for child safety. TTP said it has more reporting to come on how tech companies use outside networks to shape public opinion.
For parents trying to navigate all of this, the influencer telling you that Instagram is working hard to keep your teenager safe may genuinely believe it. She might have also been paid — and may not have understood the larger context around her claims.
————————————————
