Girl influencers' marketplace by moms is stalked by men
The ominous messages began arriving in Elissa's inbox early last year.
“You sell pics of your underage daughter to pedophiles,” read one. “You're such a naughty sick mom, you're just as sick as us pedophiles,” read another. “I will make your life hell for you and your daughter.”
Elissa has been running her daughter's Instagram account since 2020, when the girl was 11 and too young to have her own. Photos show a bright, bubbly girl modeling evening dresses, high-end workout gear and dance leotards. She has more than 100,000 followers, some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a month for more photos.
Over the years, Elissa has fielded all kinds of criticism and knows full well that some people think she is exploiting her daughter. She has even gotten used to receiving creepy messages, but these — from “Instamodelfan” — were extreme. “I think they're all pedophiles,” she said of the many online followers obsessed with her daughter and other young girls.
Elissa and her daughter inhabit the world of Instagram influencers whose accounts are managed by their parents. Although the site prohibits children under 13, parents can open socalled mom-run accounts for them, and they can live on even when the girls become teenagers.
But what often starts as a parent's effort to jump-start a child's modeling career, or win favors from clothing brands, can quickly descend into a dark underworld dominated by adult men, many of whom openly admit on other platforms to being sexually attracted to children, an investigation by The New York Times found.
Thousands of accounts examined by the Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls' worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.
The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, the Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram's algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.
One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by the Times.
Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.
Nearly 1 in 3 preteens list influencing as a career goal, and 11% of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.
Health and technology experts have recently cautioned that social media presents a “profound risk of harm” for girls.
But the pursuit of online fame, particularly through Instagram, has supercharged the often toxic phenomenon, the Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their children's images. Some of the child influencers earn six-figure incomes, according to interviews.
“I really don't want my child exploited on the internet,” said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia, who like Elissa and many other parents interviewed by the Times agreed to be identified only by a middle name to protect the privacy of her child.
“But she's been doing this so long now,” she said. “Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?”
Some girls on Instagram use their social media clout to get little more than clothing discounts; others receive gifts from Amazon wish lists, or money through Cash App; and still others earn thousands of dollars a month by selling subscriptions with exclusive content.
Account owners who report explicit images or potential predators to Instagram are typically met with silence or indifference, and those who block many abusers have seen their own accounts' ability to use certain features limited, according to the interviews and documents.
Meta, Instagram's parent company, found that 500,000 child Instagram accounts had “inappropriate” interactions every day, according to an internal study in 2020 quoted in legal proceedings.
In a statement to the Times, Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said that parents were responsible for the accounts and their content and could delete them anytime.
“Anyone on Instagram can control who is able to tag, mention or message them, as well as who can comment on their account,” Stone added, noting a feature that allows parents to ban comments with certain words. “On top of that, we prevent accounts exhibiting potentially suspicious behavior from using our monetization tools, and we plan to limit such accounts from accessing subscription content.”
Like many parents, Elissa said she protected her daughter by handling the account exclusively herself. Ultimately, she concluded, the Instagram community is dominated by “disgusting creeps,” but she nonetheless keeps the account up and running. Shutting it down, she said, would be “giving in to bullies.”
In today's creator economy, companies often turn to social media influencers to attract new customers. Giants like Kim Kardashian, who has 364 million followers on Instagram, have turned the phenomenon into a big business.
In the dance and gymnastics worlds, teens and preteens jockey to become brand ambassadors for products and apparel. They don bikinis in Instagram posts, walk runways in youth fashion shows and offer paid subscriptions to videos showing the everyday goings-on of children seeking internet fame.
The most successful girls can demand $3,000 from their sponsors for a single post on Instagram, but monetary gain can be elusive for others, who receive free or discounted clothes in exchange for their posts and have to pay for their own hairstyling and makeup, among other costs. Even youth fashion shows, including events in New York that coincide but are not affiliated with New York Fashion Week, charge the girls to participate and parents to attend.
In 2022, Instagram launched paid subscriptions, which allows followers to pay a monthly fee for exclusive content and access. The rules don't allow subscriptions for anyone under 18, but the mom-run accounts sidestep that restriction. The Times found dozens that charged from 99 cents to $19.99. At the highest price, parents offered “ask me anything” chat sessions and behindthe-scenes photos.
Child safety experts warn the subscriptions and other features could lead to unhealthy interactions, with men believing they have a special connection to the girls and the girls believing they must meet the men's needs.
“I have reservations about a child feeling like they have to satisfy either adults in their orbit or strangers who are asking something from them,” said Sally Theran, a professor at Wellesley College and clinical psychologist who studies online relationships. “It's really hard to give consent to that when your frontal lobe isn't fully developed.”
For many mom-run accounts, comments from men — admiring, suggestive or explicit — are a recurring scourge to be eradicated, or an inescapable fact of life to be ignored. For others, they are a source to be tapped.
“The first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do when I go to bed is block accounts,” said Lynn, the mother of a 6-year-old girl in Florida who has about 3,000 followers from the dance world.
Meta does not provide public information about who uses Instagram, so the Times analyzed data from the audience firms Modash and HypeAuditor, which estimate follower demographics based on their own algorithms.
The proportion of male followers varied greatly in the Times' sample, according to the estimates. Many accounts had a few thousand followers who were mostly female. But while men accounted for about 35% of the audience overall, their presence grew dramatically as accounts became more popular.