Picture this. Meta flies parenting influencers to a waterfront venue overlooking Sydney Harbour, hands out personalized scout badges and gourmet s’mores, then asks them to tell their followers that blanket bans on teen social media use are a bad idea.
That’s what happened, according to a new Tech Transparency Project investigation, which found Meta staged the Sydney event in July 2025, five months before Australia’s landmark under-16 ban took effect. TTP’s report shows that this exact playbook has now spread to more than a dozen countries where governments have started weighing similar restrictions.
How Meta’s influencer playbook works
The pattern repeats itself almost identically everywhere, per TTP’s findings. Meta hosts polished branded events, often called Instagram Safety Camp or Screen Smart, then recruits actors, radio hosts, psychologists, and parenting influencers to promote its Teen Accounts as proof that bans are unnecessary.
In Indonesia, actor Darius Sinathrya told his 1.8 million followers to try the safety features. In India, actress Juhi Parmar reassured parents their teens were safer online, just months after Instagram was found approving child abuse advertisements in the country. In Brazil, actor Douglas Silva, with three million followers, did the same.
Many posts use vague hashtags like #instagrampartner rather than clear ad disclosures. Meta also funds youth safety nonprofits and think tanks that echo its anti-ban talking points without always disclosing that funding.
Why does this matter?
Independent testing tells a story different from the influencer posts. The Washington Post previously found Teen Accounts fail to protect kids from harmful content, and TTP confirmed similar gaps, echoing a separate investigation that found Instagram was serving sexual content directly to Teen accounts despite Meta’s own safety promises.
Speaking to The Guardian, Meta spokesperson Edward Patterson disputed that its influence efforts are misleading, saying blanket bans simply push teens toward less safe, unregulated corners of the internet. However, TTP director Katie Paul sees it differently, telling The Guardian that Meta’s reliance on paid messengers proves what the company itself knows, in her words, that “the brand has become a problem.”
