what the research actually found
From January 2025 to April 2026, Temu ran more than 1.4 million individual partnership ads across the UK and 27 EU countries, reaching a combined audience of 16.9 billion impressions. That alone is a staggering volume. Then you look at what was behind it.
Czech nonprofit Online Risk Labs (ORL) analyzed Meta's public advertising transparency library and concluded that 73 of Temu's top 100 creator accounts were likely fake — what ORL calls "burner creators": profiles that don't represent real people, assembled specifically to route ad spend through Meta's Partnership Ads format.
Just one creator called "Ya Lily" — 183,000 Instagram followers, 129,000 on Facebook, an identity that ORL concludes almost certainly doesn't exist — appeared inside 109,541 Temu ad campaigns during the study window. That's roughly 225 campaigns a day.
Seventy-three percent of those top 100 accounts had changed their username at least once since creation; one account changed its handle 15 times. Forty-seven creator accounts listed Russia as their base; 19 listed China. All of this for campaigns targeting European consumers.
ORL filed its findings with the EU Digital Services Act regulator in August 2026. The underlying data came from Meta's own Ad Library.
how this ran through meta's own tools
This isn't a fringe exploit. Partnership Ads — Meta's format for routing ads through a creator's account — are one of the formats Meta has been most actively selling to brands in 2026. Meta reports a 19% lower CPA average for Partnership Ads versus standard brand ads. The Cannes Lions push, the Creator Marketing Hub, the pitch to DTC brands: Meta's argument is that the Andromeda ranking model treats creator-authenticated content as higher-signal, so it earns better delivery.
ORL's research shows how completely that authentication premise can fail. Partnership Ads represented 65.8% of Temu's total Meta advertising in those markets, according to the ORL analysis — compared to roughly 2% for a typical advertiser. Temu's spend reached up to $962M across the study period in UK + EU, which ORL estimates represents around 2% of Meta's European quarterly revenue.
Meta has stated its systems detect and remove inauthentic behavior. The data shows those systems did not flag accounts that ran hundreds of thousands of campaigns from identities that don't correspond to real people.
why your meta budget competes with this
You are not bidding in a separate auction from Temu. Partnership Ads, in-feed placements, and Advantage+ catalog campaigns all route through the same unified auction. Every impression Temu's fake-creator network bought in those markets added competitive pressure to the bids you were running.
The 1.4 million ads across 16 months were not concentrated in a single week — they were a sustained volume that shaped CPM floors in UK and EU markets throughout the period. If you saw EU or UK CPMs climb faster than revenue during that window, fake-creator auction pressure is one variable you had no visibility into. Meta Ads Manager shows you how many competitors are active in your categories. It does not tell you how many are running through accounts that don't exist.
the regulation angle affects more than just eu
ORL's DSA filing is not symbolic. The DSA gives regulators real enforcement teeth, and Meta's failure to detect what ORL found from publicly available Ad Library data is the kind of outcome regulators want explanations for. If enforcement leads to creator verification requirements or volume restrictions on Partnership Ads in EU markets, CPM dynamics there shift significantly — in ways that benefit legitimate advertisers.
US brands should still care. Platform-level policy changes driven by EU enforcement have a habit of going global. And the FTC watches what the DSA does.
what to do with this information
Don't try to replicate Temu's playbook. The regulatory exposure is real and building. Beyond that, Meta's Generative Recommender reads ad creative content to rank ads — generic AI-generated video from unverified accounts scores as low-signal content. Fake creator volume floods the system with noise, which is part of why your authentic content can underperform its quality.
Go the other direction. If you run Partnership Ads, document your creator identity verification — real name, verifiable public presence, consistent handle history. Audit your active partnerships against the signals ORL flagged: handle changes, geographic mismatches between creator location and campaign targeting, account creation date versus content volume.
Meta's auction will not get less competitive. Running campaigns the Generative Recommender actually reads as meaningful creative is how you extract value from the format that fake-creator operations can't match at scale.
If you want to see how your Meta account's creative signals and audience quality stack up against current benchmarks, the free account audit at Gromerce gives you a clear picture in about three minutes.
The core issue is straightforward: Meta's creator verification can fail at enormous scale, and your CPMs absorb the cost.
Sources: Yahoo Finance, Adweek, Search Engine Land, September 2026
