In July 2025, Meta gathered parenting influencers from all over Australia at a waterfront venue overlooking the Sydney Opera House. It was a camping-themed event and in many ways was like any other influencer affair. There were Instagram-branded tents to take pictures in, an Instagram-branded step-and-repeat, a custom-tote making station and Instagram-branded snacks and coffee cups.
But this “screen smart” event wasn’t about the photo op.
Meta was playing defense: the company had five months until the Australian government planned to enforce a new law that banned children under 16 from using social media platforms. The Silicon Valley-based firm told influencers that blanket bans on teens’ use of social media weren’t effective and recruited them to send a message to their hundreds of thousands of followers: Meta already had tools to help parents keep teens safe on Instagram.
Since 2024, Meta has tapped an army of influencers to promote its safety tools for teens. A new report by the Tech Transparency Project, a digital advocacy group, shows that whenever a government began discussing social media regulations for teens, Meta started recruiting lifestyle, parenting and mental health creators to promote parental and other safety controls the company already offers, including its accounts for users between the ages of 13 and 17, which have more restrictions than regular accounts. Meta recruited influencers through events, like the one in Australia, and paid some of them for their advocacy by sponsoring posts, according to the report.
Meta also found support from parent, advocacy and research groups that it supports financially in pushing back against teen bans or restrictions, according to the report.
Meta’s reliance on influencers to fight the bans suggests the company recognizes it can’t fight these measures, which would could cost it millions of users, alone, said Katie Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project. Meta needs to use influencers to spread its message because people don’t trust the company, said Paul. “The brand has become a problem,” Paul said.
Responding to questions about the report, Meta said that the firm works hard to “build strong protections for teens and effective controls for parents”.
“Blanket bans don’t keep young people safe, they simply push them toward less safe, unregulated corners of the internet,” said Edward Patterson, a spokesperson. “Where our apps remain available, such as in Australia where 16- and 17-year-olds are defaulted into Teen Accounts, we will continue working with parents and experts to ensure families are aware of our safety features, and know how to make the most of them.”
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In November 2024, Australia became the first country in the world to ban teens under 16 from using social media apps. The law, which went into effect in December 2025, required social media companies to shut down existing teen accounts and reject new ones. (Meta already had rules in place that barred kids younger than 13 from opening an account.)
Concern over teen use of social media has been growing since at least 2021, when whistleblowers including Frances Haugen and Arturo Bejar shared internal Meta documents showing the company knew teens were being exposed to harmful content but didn’t work to mitigate those harms. In the US, several states sued Meta, accusing the company of deliberately making its platform addictive to younger users.
Meta has since introduced teen accounts with built-in restrictions, including limits on who can message teen users and more sensitive content filters that limit their exposure to violent or harmful videos. But concerns have remained.
Australia passed its law after a 2025 study it commissioned found that 96% of children between the ages of 10 and 15 used social media and that 71% of those children were exposed to harmful content, including fight videos, posts that encourage unhealthy eating or exercise habits and sexist or otherwise hateful posts.
Meta has taken down 756,000 accounts it suspected belonged to teens since the ban. Meanwhile, the move to restrict or altogether ban teens from using social media has gained momentum around the world.
Indonesia became the first south-east Asian country to roll out a blanket teen social media ban in March 2026. Some states in India have issued blanket bans, while the country continues to consider regulating social media use for children. Brazil introduced the Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents in March 2026 which, among other regulations, requires strict age verification systems and children’s accounts to be linked to their parents’.
These countries represent some of the biggest markets for social media companies and Meta in particular. In all of them, Meta launched some version of its influencer campaign.
In Australia, several of the creators who attended the “Instagram Safety Camp” had paid partnerships with the company and shared posts lauding Meta for the work it was doing to keep teens safe. Tammin Sursok, an actor known for her role in Pretty Little Liars who posts about parenting, said the event was “an amazing way to hear what Instagram is doing to keep our teens safe with #instagramteenaccounts”. She cited some teen account features including parental supervision, protections from explicit images and restrictions to livestreaming and ended her post with #instagrampartner implying a paid partnership with the company.
Meta said it does not disclose the terms of individual partnerships.
One of the panels featured a representative from ReachOut Australia, an online youth mental health resource, who later shared insights from the safety camp online. ReachOut Australia lists Meta as one of its “gold” sponsors. As part of their partnership with ReachOut, Meta helped finance an online teen safety series that touted Instagram teen accounts in several episodes.
Meta said it had been working with ReachOut for the better part of a decade to create campaigns that inform users of the safety tools available to them, but that the organization had its own independent editorial voice and mission. “No partner, including Meta, reviews or approves what we publish or what our people say publicly,” a spokesperson for ReachOut Australia said.
In Indonesia, months after the government announced it was considering age restrictions for social media platforms, Meta hosted a series of events including its Instagram safety camp. Darius Sinathrya, a well-known Indonesian actor with 1.8 million followers, shared footage of one of the panels and encouraged his followers to try Meta’s safety features. “Come on, parents try this feature to make your children safer and smarter in the digital world,” he wrote in his caption.
In February 2026, Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s electronics information technology minister, said the government was discussing age-based social media restrictions. Over the next few months, mom influencers all over India began sharing paid posts about Instagram’s teen accounts. One account with 250,000 followers, Imperfect Mom Who Travels, posted a video that showed her son starting an Instagram teen account. “Glad to see @Instagram Teen Accounts come with built-in protections designed for age-appropriate experiences from day one. #ad,” the caption reads.
That same week, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based thinktank Observer Research Foundation argued in a column that teen social media bans are ineffective. The Observer Research Foundation received funding from Facebook India in 2022 and lists Meta as well as several other big tech firms among its partners.
Meta said it did not pay the author or organization to write the opinion piece. Observer Research Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
Bejar, the Facebook whistleblower who worked on online safety at the company, said influencers promoting teen accounts were creating a false promise of safety and security the accounts just don’t provide.
“You can still search for suicide and self-harm content even though they promise you can’t,” Bejar said. “You can search for eating disorder content and it’s their own search recommendations that circumvent their own safety features.”
It was yet more evidence that Meta cares more about its brand than safety, Bejar said. “It’s wrong that they’re leveraging their own platform to both advertise and then also leverage creators who benefit from the platform. There’s conflicts of interest across the board to create a false and dangerous impression of security and safety for young people.”
Meta said Bejar’s experience with Instagram’s safety features predated teen accounts.
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Governments around the world are scrambling to mitigate the harms of social media on teen users, and many are reaching for blanket bans or other age-based restrictions to do so. Experts are still debating whether those restrictions are effective, enforceable or the best mechanism to protect children.
In Australia, the country’s internet regulator found that more than 80% of teens were still using social media three months after the ban. Many teens also reported they weren’t asked their ages when using those platforms despite the government intending to double the penalty for tech firms that don’t comply with the law. The study highlights how difficult it is to police and enforce restrictions on digital platforms.
“We never expected that this would have 100% compliance,” said Andrew Leigh, assistant minister for productivity, competition, charities and treasury, at a conference defending the ban. “We don’t get 100% compliance out of minimum drinking age laws, but it’s still appropriate that we have that law on the books.”
In the US and the UK, digital advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future, which have historically opposed many of Meta’s data-privacy practices, have argued that bans and other age-based restrictions deny young people their rights to access information and speak online, said David Greene, senior counsel at EFF.
Greene argues government intervention should be a last resort and that non-governmental alternatives – such as parental control tools provided by the companies – are better options than a government stepping in.
Paul of the Tech Transparency Project, argued Meta had had many opportunities to prove it can create a platform that’s safe for children and teens.
“Facebook and its sister platforms have been around for 20 years at this point and the company has proven that it cannot be trusted to self-regulate – so what we’re seeing is governments taking that last resort and saying: ‘OK if kids can’t be protected on these platforms we’re going to have to do it ourselves,’” said Paul.
