Special report: Shocking data reveals adult men the majority of followers on kidfluencer accounts

Parents of kidfluencers beware: Australian data show 73 per cent of young girls’ Instagram followers are men. Read our special report.

The Instagram account is as innocent and as sweet as a bubblegum-pink tween sleepover. It shows a young teenage girl hanging out with her best friends, practising handstands and cartwheels, and unboxing packages of free PR gifts.

These are posts designed for teenage girls. But 73 per cent of the audience viewing the pictures are adult men.

The account is just one of an alarming number of Australian child social media accounts targeted at kids but predominantly viewed by men, an investigation by The Saturday Telegraph has uncovered.

Federal eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant has called on the platforms to identify the predatory accounts and protect at-risk children.

“If you can gather a list of the top 200 child influencer accounts and see their followers and gender breakdown, then Instagram would be picking up the same signals,” she said.

“They have the tools to identify when adult accounts are following children’s accounts.

“They also have the capability of using AI and natural language processing to pick up sexualised comments.”

Australian eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant says social media platforms need to do more to protect children. Picture: Jonathan Ng

The investigation, which looked at about 200 accounts held by popular Aussie kid influencers, uncovered multiple teen accounts with as many as 70 per cent of adult male followers.

There were many more accounts where adult males vastly outnumbered adult women following child dancers, models and gymnasts.

The data, provided by social media demographics company HypeAuditor, showed this disturbing trend was more pronounced with female accounts under 18 years old.

“While the average influencer account in Australia has 38 per cent male followers, some young female accounts can have up to 70 per cent male followers,” a HypeAuditor spokesman said.

Of the top 50 accounts with large male followings, half were child modelling accounts.

Further analysis showed that for every young boy who followed a child influencer, there were six adult men.

The older men also left hundreds of sexualised comments on the pages of underage girls including “sweet and sensual,” “hot as coffee,” “so cute” and telling one child she was “beautiful beautiful beautiful perfect princess, you in a bikini are the best I love you beautiful princess.”

An analysis of hundreds of Australian ‘kidfluencer’ Instagram accounts found up to 73 per cent of followers were older men.

Some of the followers create highly sexualised fan art – both AI-generated and hand drawn – of the girls in suggestive poses and outfits. The Telegraph has chosen not to identify the accounts in order to protect the children.

A US investigation by The Wall Street Journal this year found one young girl’s account with an audience of 92 per cent adult men.

Another investigation by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers revealed that Instagram actively pushed child influencer accounts onto users who had shown sexual interest in children. The algorithm will also prioritise sexual content related to both children and adults.

It is something eSafety Commissioner Ms Inman-Grant finds deeply disturbing.

“There is an incentive to get more likes and more followers. This is when the social circle turns vicious. When you are trying to maximise your audience, you have to know that the more sexualised images you send out, the more (followers) you are going to attract,” she said.

While Instagram bans children under the age of 13 from having an account, parents are able to run an account on a child’s behalf.

Many of these accounts are plastered with warnings such as “Mum manages this account,” and “Creeps will be blocked!” But, as one parent has noticed, it does little to stop the predators.

A highly inappropriate comment on one young girl’s account.

The mother of a 13-year-old girl who has more than 120,000 followers on Instagram said it was a daily battle to keep her daughter safe from predators online.

The teen is a budding entrepreneur and uses the account to work towards her dream of starting her own skincare brand. The page has all the sweetness of a pre-teen sleepover party, filled with face masks, silly dances, hair tutorials and manicures.

Her mother has forbidden her from posting bikini photos, pictures in her school uniform or doing anything “that could be seen as inviting.”

There is, in the mum’s eyes, absolutely no reason for men to be following her daughter’s account. Yet, they do. Each day, the mum meticulously scrolls through her daughter’s followers, analysing their age and gender and blocking anyone who is not a young teenage girl. But it can be hard to keep up.

“I have been told that if you suddenly get a strong influx of males coming to your daughter’s page, it means that she has been picked up somewhere, and she’s been put into one of those pedophile pages. That scared the shit out of me,” the mum said.

“I wish Instagram had a way to block all adult men. For me, if any man over the age of 15 is following my daughter, it’s inappropriate.”

Ayla Hendricks with her two children, Lucian, 12, and nine-year-old Ayda (right), have Instagram accounts where they have been followed by older men. Read the story below. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Ms Inman-Grant said Instagram had the capacity to protect children but was failing them.

“They should be taking these (comments) down proactively … using classifiers and AI to pick up inappropriate content that violates their services,” she said. “But they should also be making the reporting forms so much more discoverable and easy to use.”

She said there was no reason an older man should be following the account of a young child.

“It’s gross and creepy.”

But some parents were actively courting the attention, according to Ms Inman Grant.

“Some of these child influencer accounts are totally innocent, age-appropriate and fun. But some of them do show young girls in crop tops, with their booty hanging out in a way that is not age appropriate, or sexualised,” she said.

She said parents were incentivised to encourage this behaviour due to Instagram’s algorithm structure which prioritises sexual pictures, meaning their child’s account is more likely to grow.

Men make up a disturbing majority of people following the accounts of kidfluencers. File picture: iStock

A Sydney child talent agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they had stopped representing child influencers after witnessing “sickening” behaviour by some parents.

The agent said underage photos of a former client were uncovered in a child sex ring.

“The parent was more concerned about losing followers than shutting down the page, which horrified me,” the agent said. “The child was seven or eight at the time.”

A Meta spokesman said Instagram required people to be at least 13 years old to sign up for an account.

“Accounts representing someone under 13 must be actively managed by a parent or manager, who is responsible for their content and can control who is able to message and comment on the account’s posts,” the spokesman said.

“We’ve developed a range of features that help people protect themselves from unwanted contact, including Hidden Words, which lets you filter comments and messages that contain certain phrases, as well as blocking and reporting.

“On top of that, we recently updated our policy so that accounts primarily posting content focused on children aren’t eligible to use our monetisation tools to receive payments from other Instagram users.”

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