Temu's Influencer Army Was Mostly Bots

According to Fortune, Temu quietly stopped funding a network of fake influencer accounts on Meta's platforms within days of being exposed, after spending nearly a billion dollars on "creator" partnership ads across the UK and the EU. The Czech nonprofit Online Risk Labs counted 73 of Temu's top 100 "creators" as almost certainly bots, including one account that posted about 225 ads a day and then just went dark.

The mechanism is the "partnership ad," Meta's polite name for a brand paying to make a stranger's phone post do the brand's talking. Regular advertisers run these on about 2% of their spend. Temu ran 65.8%. That is not a marketing decision. That is the business model.

Here is the part that should end careers. Of the top 100 "creators" by ad volume, 73 were almost certainly fake, as IBTimes UK broke down in its own math. Nonsense names, based in Russia, China, Bangladesh, and Iran, while targeting European shoppers. One account changed its name 15 times. No real influencer does that, because no real influencer is running 225 ads a day and then going silent on a Tuesday. Your "influencer" recommendation was, statistically, a mailbox with a follower count.

And when the numbers ran, the machine did not apologize. It turned the tap off. Ninety of the 100 accounts dropped to zero almost overnight. The real creators kept getting funded. The ghosts got switched off like lights in an empty office. A billion dollars, and the whole cleanup was one dashboard click. Meta declined to comment, which is the most honest line in the story, given what Reuters already knows about who funds half the feed.

YOUR TURN: When 73 of the top 100 faces are bots, was it ever an ad at all, or just a very expensive screensaver?