To be worried about my 12 year old niece?

[BlueThesaurusRex]

I have a 12 year old niece who has an instagram account.
Her name makes it seen like she's an older teenager and her pictures are all heavily filtered so you can't quite see how old she actually is.

She has hundreds of followers who can see all her pics and private message her.

One of her recent pics had comments on it from a profile which was full of incredibly rude and adult pics and lots of her followers are older male teenagers (or are pretending to be!)

I've told her mum (who isn't very tech savvy) and she said she would have a look at her profile and get rid of some of the followers who she didn't actually know.

She hasn't done this and niece now has even more followers!

I'm beginning to really worry that she's going to get groomed online or do something stupid like sending personal pics etc. but as her aunt is there anything I can do?

Can I do anything to make her mum take it more seriously or do I just need to mind my business and stop overreacting?

The minimum age is 13 so you could report the account. But it's likely she will start a new one and block you.

Would she know it was me who reported her?

No she wouldn't know

Right, temporary fix... On it!!

Could you sit down with her mum away from niece and physically show her so she can see? If she's totally not tech savvy she may have told niece to do it and assumed she
Did.

That sounds like a good idea. Personally what I'd like to do is get into her account and just go on a massive cull 😂 I don't think she'd ever speak to me again though so probably sitting with mum might work better

I suspect her mum will kill the messenger, since you've already told her and she has said its fine (which it obviously isn't).
Is there a way you could do it that's face saving for the mum, and therefore likely to get a response where her anger is directed at the people messaging her DD? How about just focusing on that one especially bad message - blame it all on the person who sent the message - and when her mum accepts that that needs attention speak about how to prevent it happening again until her DD is older.

Don't be surprised to find that her mum thinks having lots of followers is a good thing as it implies popularity. Some people are stupid that way.

I dont do instagram, but can you not go through the account with her mum and show her what your concerned about, or screenshot the account of the older guy you're worried about and send them to her?

My kids are on instagram and I do have chats with them about safety, but they know more than me, the schools do talks about this stuff all the time.

Both great pieces of advice there, thank you! I've screenshot some of the worst accounts but now my phone is full of 15 year old boys with their shirts off 🙈 If her mum doesn't find that highly inappropriate then there's definitely issues there