Kylie Jenner’s partnership to promote the new generation of Meta glasses crosses a line and betrays the trust of teenage girls, writes psychologist Carly Dober.
In modern capitalism, few figures embody the transactional nature of influence quite like Kylie Jenner. She is a self-reported billionaire (though many contest that claim) because she mastered parasocial relationships and selling herself as a brand with her extended family. Her fortune was largely built on the insecurities of teenage girls by peddling lip kits to an audience desperate to emulate her pout, and later, skin-tight loungewear to a generation locked indoors.
Her relationship with teenage girls was a symbiotic, if ethically questionable one, in which Jenner offered a fantasy: an invitation that they, too, could live a life like hers if they bought into the dream, and her fans offered their disposable income and unwavering loyalty.
But her latest venture of a strategic partnership with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta to promote the new generation of Meta glasses crosses a sharp line from cynical commerce into something far more grotesque, in my opinion.
This is not just another product launch; it is a deeply unfeminist act that weaponises the parasocial bonds Jenner cultivated to serve a surveillance machine that has already proven it is willing to harm the girls who worship her.
To understand the betrayal, one must look at Meta’s track record.
It is not speculation that Instagram, the crown jewel of the Meta empire, is toxic for teenage girls. Internal company research, leaked in the seminal Wall Street Journal investigation and later corroborated by congressional testimony, was damning.
Meta’s own slideshows revealed that Instagram makes body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls. The platform exacerbates feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and depression after a session on the app. These were the findings of Meta’s own data scientists, hidden from the public while the company continued to pump features that encouraged social comparison.
As of 2025, Facebook reported 2.28 billion active users globally, a staggering 27.9 per cent of the human population. Even if only a fraction of that demographic purchases the Meta glasses, the scale of data capture is unprecedented. These glasses are a Trojan horse for the physical world, designed to harvest biometric data, visual feeds, and environmental context at mass scale. They are the ultimate data-extraction tool, turning everyday life into a searchable database for Meta’s ad engine and potentially fueling further training for any AI ventures the company has, all without anyone’s consent.
This is where Jenner’s complicity becomes active. She is not just an influencer; she is the gatekeeper for a demographic that Meta has historically targeted with impunity. By modelling and endorsing these glasses (even just for a pay cheque), she is signal-boosting a product to her hundreds of millions of impressionable followers, telling them that this device is a shortcut to cool, much like her lip kits were a shortcut to beauty. When a teenager buys a lip kit, they lose 20 dollars. When a teenager buys Meta glasses, they lose their privacy. They invite a camera and a microphone into their bedrooms, their bathrooms, and their most intimate moments, feeding a data-hungry machine that has already been caught using dark patterns to keep them scrolling until they feel empty.
This is the marriage of tech and fashion at its most predatory. The parasocial relationship and the illusion that Kylie is their friend, their confidant, is the medium through which the poison is administered. Jenner uses the intimacy of her social media presence to normalise a device that exists to dismantle the very concept of private space. When tech pairs with fashion in this manner, we all lose. We lose the boundary between the public persona and the private individual. We lose the ability to exist without being quantified, analysed, and sold.
To make matters worse, this partnership comes in the wake of revelations that lay bare Meta’s cynical disregard for humanity. In her memoir Careless People, former Facebook director of public policy Sarah Wynn-Williams exposed the rot at the company’s core. She alleged that the internal policy on content moderation, established in February 2015, prioritised one thing and one thing only: survival. According to Wynn-Williams, Joel Kaplan, summarising Mark Zuckerberg’s stance, made it clear that content would only be taken down if two criteria were met: a credible threat to block Facebook, or a risk to employees. That’s it. Not the safety of children. Not the mental health of teenage girls. Not the truth. Not anything else. Only the preservation of the company’s market access and the physical safety of its staff.
This ethos is the DNA of Meta. It is a company that has consistently proven it cares only about growth, irrespective of the human cost. By partnering with Zuckerberg, Kylie Jenner is endorsing a worldview that views her own fan base as cannon fodder. She is saying, implicitly, that the profits from a new surveillance gadget are worth more than the well-being of the young women who funded her lifestyle.
I don’t believe that there is a feminist lens through which this partnership is justifiable. Feminism, at its core, is about the liberation and protection of women and girls. It is about dismantling systems that prey on vulnerability. Kylie Jenner is taking a system—surveillance capitalism—that preys specifically on the insecurities of young women and handing them the weapon to use against themselves. She is leveraging her power, not to shield her fans from harm, but to open the door wider for the very corporation that profits from their pain.
Kylie Jenner has the power to shift culture. She could use it to encourage privacy, digital literacy, or self-acceptance. Instead, she is using it to sell a grotesque pair of glasses that will stare back at her fans, record their lives, and sell their data to the highest bidder in the black void of data trading. It is the ultimate act of selling out, not because she is rich, but because she is using the trust of teenage girls to sell them into a system that does not care how they live, and how well they are in their lives, only that they click and keep scrolling.