A casual mention of BTS in a video turned into an avalanche of angry messages for one teenage influencer. “I got like 1,000 DMs from BTS fans, people abusing me just because I said something about the band,” the 19-year-old year old influencer recalled.
This is just a glimpse into the vast and unpredictable audience teenage influencers in India attract online. While their fame grows across YouTube and Instagram, an important question lingers—who is really watching them, and what does that mean for their safety?
An Adult Audience For Teenage Influencers
Despite being teenagers themselves, many young influencers in India primarily attract an older audience. Nisha Topwal, mother of 15-year-old Anantya Anand, better known as MyMissAnand, admits that most of her daughter’s 13.9 million YouTube subscribers are adults. “Only 10-20% of her audience is actually between 12 and 16,” she explained.
But she has a theory: “Kids often log in from their parents’ accounts. When they turn 16 and get their own phones, they start following directly.”
Similarly, 19-year-old Raj Grover, a content creator with 13.9 million YouTube subscribers and 2 million Instagram followers, sees a mix of young and older viewers. His manager, Ujjwal Seth, noted that around 30-40% of his audience falls within the 13-17 age bracket, while the rest are older. “Until I was 15, I used my mother’s phone. I wasn’t even allowed on Instagram until I turned 17,” Raj shared, highlighting how parental control plays a crucial role in teenage social media habits.
For 16-year-old Meethika Dwivedi, known as @the_sound_blaze on Instagram, the majority of her 3.3 million followers are between 18-28 years old. “I started just for fun during the COVID lockdown, but I never expected my audience to be so male-dominated,” she said.
“Interestingly, sometime back Pakistan’s Karachi started appearing in my top cities. I have a lot of audience in Pakistan,” the influencer said.
Meethika’s manager, Ananya Samir Tikekar told Decode that the teenage influencer’s audience skews heavily male, with Delhi, Mumbai, and Lucknow being her top cities. The child influencer’s manager regularly monitors her followers and ensures Instagram’s periodic bot purges don’t affect her account.
“I remember last year, a lot of creators saw a certain dip in their followers and when we reached out to Meta, they said that’s because they did a round of cleansing. So, if there were any double accounts, fake or bot accounts, they were deleted by Meta,” she said.
Thirteen-year-old singer Jayas Kumar, who rose to fame on Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Little Champs, primarily attracts middle-aged viewers and young parents. His mother, Suruchi Kumar, notes that much of his audience hails from Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, and Delhi. Unlike many influencers, Jayas’ Instagram account wasn’t even created by his family.
“His Instagram account (134K followers) is not monetised. When he was in Sa Re Ga Ma Pa, one of the fans created this account and gave the login credentials as a gift to Jayas,” she said.
Decode spoke to teenage influencers from across India, their managers and their parents to understand their audience demographics. Turns out, the largest audience of teenage content creators are not teenagers like themselves, they are adults.
Why Audience Demographies Matter
Understanding who follows teenage influencers isn’t just a matter of analytics; it has real implications for online safety.
A June 2024 report by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Thorn found that Instagram is the most common platform for financial sextortion, with teenage boys aged 14-17 being the primary targets. In 2023, an average of 812 cases were reported every week, highlighting the vulnerabilities young users face.
In response, Instagram introduced Teen Accounts in India on February 11, 2025. These accounts are private by default for users under 16 (and under 18 at sign-up), with built-in protections like restricted messaging, limited tagging, and the strongest version of the Hidden Words anti-bullying feature.
Teen accounts will also offer messaging restrictions wherein they can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to. To make any changes to the strict default settings, teenagers will require parents’ consent. “Teens can only be tagged or mentioned by people they follow. Additionally, the strictest version of the anti-bullying feature, Hidden Words, will be enabled by default to filter out offensive language in comments and DM requests,” read Meta’s blog.
They also come with daily time-limit alerts, nudging teenagers to log off after 60 minutes.
The Dark Side of Fame: Comments and Criticism
Being in the public eye comes with scrutiny. Meethika has noticed a shift in her audience since she started creating makeup-related content. “Earlier, most of my comments came from boys. Now, I see a lot more engagement from girls,” she said. However, some still question her identity. “People often ask: ‘Are you a girl or a boy?’ because of the way I talk.”
The demographics of an influencer’s audience also influence the kind of content they create. Using the tool ExportComments, we analysed comments received on four posts shared by Meethika aka @the_sound_blaze with a sample size of 400 comments.
The analysis revealed a mix of encouragement, criticism, and misogynistic remarks like “Ladkiyan toh sirf attention ke liye aise karti hain” (Girls do this just for attention) and “Ye sab feminism ka natak hai” (This is all just feminist drama).
The 16-year-old told Decode that for every 50 comments, there will be at least five comments that are inappropriate and sometimes downright abusive. “I simply block such accounts. Because the intention of these comments is to provoke and get a reaction from me, which is unnecessary. People may not notice their comments but if I say something, everyone will highlight that,” she said.
Meethika and her manager now rely on Instagram’s restricted words feature to filter out offensive language. “If a comment includes a blocked word like ‘paagal’ (mad), it won’t appear at all,” she explained.
For Anantya, criticism often revolves around her transformation over the years. “People comment about how she has changed and how her cuteness is ‘gone,’” her mother said.
Meanwhile, Raj has learned to ignore negativity. “When I was 16-17, I used to call out haters in my Instagram stories. Now, I don’t engage at all.”
Jayas’ mother highlighted that YouTube often disables comments on videos featuring minors. “We ignore trolls. Jayas was too young to deal with them anyway,” she said.
Parental Controls In Digital Age
While these teenage influencers are out there for public consumption, they also have to navigate their own set of parental controls.
Meethika’s parents don’t allow her to travel alone for safety reasons, which sometimes costs her professional opportunities. Anantya’s parents monitor her social media usage but haven’t imposed restrictions. Her Instagram is logged into both her and her mother’s phones.
Raj follows a different rule: his phone is taken away at 12:30 am. Meanwhile, Jayas’ mother enforces screen-free zones at home. “No phones while eating or in the bedroom. We prefer books over gadgets,” she said.
Can Online Spaces Be Safer For Teenagers?
Decode spoke to experts working in the field of online safety for children regarding the issues related to teenagers’ safety on different social media platforms and the steps that can be taken to make the internet a safer space.
Arnika Singh, co-founder and director of programs, Social and Media Matters feels that awareness and dialogue is the way ahead. “In Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, every young child wants to be an influencer, but they have no idea what follows. Many don’t realize how risky it is to have strangers, often older men, in their DMs,” she warned.
Arnika has been conducting workshops at schools and has spoken to multiple students about navigating the online space. She recalled a schoolgirl in Karnataka who was scared to block a man harassing her online. “She was afraid it might trigger him to do something worse. If we hadn’t been at her school, who would she have turned to?”
Arnika also pointed out that even though Instagram doesn’t allow children below the age of 13 years to make an account, she has seen children studying in 4th and 5th standards having public accounts on Instagram and aspiring to become influencers.
“Their engagement with people is something that needs to be monitored or there needs to be somebody who is having this discussion. Now, who will have this discussion? How can you have it at scale? They are all based in schools. How much are the platforms really having this conversation? You can’t go to every household, I understand but you can have such conversations in schools. Teachers, professors don’t know the basic safety settings of platforms like Instagram and I don’t blame them because the capacity has never been built.”
Meanwhile, Rati foundation has been working to create spaces and communities where children are safe from sexual violence. Siddharth Pillai, co-founder and director, Rati foundation stressed on the point of having a faster response mechanism.
“For teenagers under 18, platforms act quickly if explicit content is leaked. But once they turn 18, it becomes a privacy battle. We need faster takedown mechanisms regardless of age,” Pillai told Decode.
“When you plead for privacy, the perpetrators or the person misusing your photos, they get intimated and blackmail you further. Hence, I feel that the response systems need to be faster,” he added.