Temu axed its $1 billion network of fake influencer accounts on Meta

Temu appears to have largely stopped funding a network of fake accounts on Meta’s platforms in the days after it was first exposed by Fortune.Temu had spent nearly $1 billion funding partnership ads with various influencers and creators on Instagram and Facebook, targeting users in the U.K. and 27 E.U. countries, according to Online Risk Labs, a Czech-based social media research group. ORL examined a sample period of Temu’s advertising activity over 16 months ending in April 2026.Around 73 of the 100 influencers whose pages featured the most Temu ads were probably fake, according to ORL. The accounts often had nonsensical names, were based in China, Russia, Bangladesh, or Iran, and some of them frequently changed names—all symptoms of inauthentic activity, according to ORL.

These 100 accounts participated in more than 1.4 million partnership ads, achieving a cumulative reach of almost 17 billion pairs of eyeballs, ORL told Fortune. (Meta’s partnership ad program allows influencers to create content that promotes a brand, tagging the company in each post. If the company likes the content, it can pay to boost it just like a paid ad. Creators........

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