When the influencer is a 13-year-old girl and 92% of her audience is adult males

It was her mother who opened the Instagram account three years ago as a way to “escape” during the pandemic. It was a way for her and her daughter, a pre-teen dancer, to share photos with family, friends and other young dancers and mothers. She said the two bonded, posting pictures of the girl dancing, modeling and living life in a small town in the Midwestern states.

My mom, a former marketing manager, ran the account and watched the number of followers grow. Soon photographers offered to take professional photos of the girl. Many brands have started sending them free clothes to promote. Then came the regular contracts. With companies.

Brands and men

“We didn’t have the page for a month and brands were saying, ‘Can we send her prom clothes?'” my mom told the Wall Street Journal. “It became popular very quickly.” While she was rejoicing in her daughter’s success and arrival, she noticed something alarming on the board. Account Control: Most of the girl’s followers were adult men.

Men were leaving public comments on the daughter’s photos with fire and heart emojis, telling her how wonderful she was. These were… “domesticated,” he says. There were also those who sent direct messages declaring their obsession with the girl, or obscene comments and pictures, and even links to pornographic sites. Her mother would sometimes spend two to four hours a day blocking users or deleting inappropriate comments.

“dream job”

At the same time, there were more sponsorships and deals. “The bill kept growing and the brands were no longer just dance brands,” explained the daughter, now in high school. “It was really cool,” he says, seeming to revel in the popularity and profit and oblivious to the rest of it.

Daughter loves making creative posts. She told her mother she wanted to become an influencer, a “dream job” she could pursue after school, along with dancing. “It wasn’t like I was trying to push her to become a star, but part of me thought it was inevitable, that it could happen one day,” her mother said. “He just has that personality.”

To reach the top tier of influencers, an account will need a much larger following — and will need to be less discriminating about who they are. Instagram promotes content based on engagement, and male accounts tend to engage strongly, lingering on photos and videos to get likes and comments. Removing it entirely, or disabling comments entirely, would likely doom her daughter’s ambitions to become an influencer.

“You have to accept that”

On the other hand, the mother believes, as she told the Wall Street Journal, that the account brought her closer to her daughter. Additionally, even second-tier influencers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a year or more. He thought the money could help pay for college. So she let her daughter keep the bill.

Being a young influencer on Instagram means building an audience that includes a large number of men who are sexually interested in children. The account’s dashboard recently capped the number of male followers at 92%. At one point, it offered Instagram memberships to users willing to pay a monthly fee for additional photos and videos. Many of them were men too.

Thousands of other young influencers and their parents have created similar accounts using social media sites to promote posts and products.

“If you want to be an influencer and work with brands and get paid, you have to work with the algorithm, and it’s all about how many people like your post and engage with it. You have to accept that,” the mother explains.

The algorithm… makes it easier

Parents have found that Instagram, which is owned by Meta Platforms, has a particular problem.

Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is designed to identify users’ interests and promote similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers found that when an account is sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends children’s accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

This algorithm has become the engine that fuels the growth of a pernicious world in which young girls’ online popularity depends on gaining a large number of male followers.

Meta answer

Meta said it has spent more than a decade working on how to keep kids safe online, and has developed tools, features and resources to support teens and their parents.

In response to Wall Street Journal articles that showed how its algorithms linked pedophiles to accounts and promotions of material that sexualized children, the company said it had taken a number of steps to remove offending accounts and enhance security.

The company is developing technology to identify accounts belonging to potentially suspicious adults. It said it had removed tens of thousands of such accounts in recent months.

And the responsibility of the parents themselves

Pictures of young girls on Instagram have become dark currency, obsessively shared and discussed among men via encrypted messaging apps like Telegram. The Wall Street Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which men had an obsession with certain body parts and commented on the fact that many parents of young influencers are aware that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.

A man who followed a teenage girl’s account said her mother knew “very well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “perverted grown men.” Still others claim to be from modeling agencies. Or companies looking for influencers to collaborate.

The mother, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal on condition of anonymity, said that after she learned that photos of her daughter were being circulated on Telegram, she sought partnerships with brands that offered school and leisure wear rather than clingy dancewear.

Meta tracks everything new influencers do on Instagram. It links their accounts to strangers and can sabotage their access when it chooses. The company periodically terminates accounts if they are found to have violated its policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been closed without such violations occurring.

While researching this report, the account referenced in the article was closed twice. Mita considered herself to have entered into dangerous paths, as she did what a mother would not do, and chose to keep the door open for her daughter’s following to grow. But the account is only closed for a short period. The potential for sexual exploitation of teenage girls remains – often at the risk of parents.