Temu Halts $1 Billion Fake Influencer Network on Meta

Temu has largely ceased funding a network of fake influencer accounts on Meta's Instagram and Facebook platforms in the days following its exposure by Fortune. The e-commerce giant had reportedly allocated nearly $1 billion to partnership ads with various influencers and creators across the U.K. and 27 E.U. countries over a 16-month period ending in April 2026. This assessment comes from Online Risk Labs (ORL), a Czech-based social media research group that analyzed Temu's advertising activities. ORL identified that approximately 73 out of 100 influencers whose pages featured the most Temu ads were likely inauthentic. These accounts often exhibited characteristics of fake activity, including nonsensical names, origins in China, Russia, Bangladesh, or Iran, and frequent name changes. According to ORL's findings shared with Fortune, these 100 accounts were involved in over 1.4 million partnership ads, reaching an estimated cumulative audience of nearly 17 billion "eyeballs." Meta's partnership ad program enables influencers to promote brands by tagging them in posts, with companies having the option to pay to boost this content as if it were a paid advertisement, sharing revenue with the creators. Meta had previously disclosed that partnership ads were on track for a $10 billion annual run rate across Facebook and Instagram. Fortune's initial report on this network of potentially fake accounts was published on August 31. At that time, Temu was reportedly running approximately 4,900 separate partnership campaigns daily through this network. However, by September 4, a noticeable shift occurred, with 90 of the identified accounts suddenly displaying zero advertising from Temu. Among the top 100 accounts, 54 stopped utilizing partnership ads almost immediately after August 31. While Temu's broader creator network is estimated to involve over 12,000 accounts, many of which are considered legitimate, the overall volume of partnership ads initiated by Temu saw a reduction of nearly half in the wake of Fortune's investigative story. The largest account highlighted, "Ya Lilly," operating the Instagram account "@findgadgetswithme" with 183,000 followers and the Facebook profile "M" with 129,000 followers, was among those affected by the apparent pullback.