What Is MASAI School? Why It’s Spamming Your Kid’s Social Media and What To Do About It
Last Tuesday, I was clearing dinner plates when my 13-year-old daughter Mia trundled over holding her cracked iPhone 11, notifications buzzing so hard I could feel it through the kitchen table. “Can you fix this?” she said, shoving the phone at me. “I can’t go five minutes without my phone dinging, and it’s all just the same stupid word.” I unlocked it, pulled up TikTok, and her notification feed was 27 straight alerts of new comments: MASAI. MASAI. MASAI. Every comment on her recent reel of our cat jumping off the backyard fence was just that one word, from random accounts she’d never heard of.
Mia explained what was going on fast. It’s a giveaway from a brand called MASAI School, she said. If you comment MASAI on 10 of your friends’ posts and share the campaign link in your bio, you get one entry to win a free MacBook. If you get a friend to sign up for the school’s email list with your referral link, you get five more entries. Half her group chat was talking about it last weekend, and one girl spent three hours scrolling through her feed commenting on every post just to rack up entries. Mia hadn’t joined, but she was still stuck dealing with the spam on her own posts.
I pulled up MASAI School’s website out of curiosity. They sell online coding courses for teens, which sounds unobjectionable on the surface. But this giveaway campaign is structured to turn every participant into a free, unpaid marketer. There’s no big ad buy, no paid promotion — kids do all the work of spreading the brand name for a 1-in-hundreds-of-thousands shot at a free gadget. I checked Instagram next, and the pattern was identical: every public post from local middle schoolers with a few hundred followers had at least a dozen MASAI comments. Even our PTA parent group’s post about the fall bake sale got a random MASAI spam comment last week.
I texted a handful of other parents to see if they’d run into it, and almost all of them had. One mom said her 12-year-old son had already snuck and signed up with his personal email, and now he’s getting 10 marketing emails a day from MASAI that he can’t figure out how to unsubscribe from. Another said her kid was upset for an hour after the giveaway ended, because he never got an email saying he lost and he kept checking his spam folder waiting for the prize announcement. My kid’s math teacher mentioned it at pickup last week, saying she’s caught three kids typing MASAI comments during independent work time this month.
Most parents I’ve talked to are reacting one of two ways: they either brush it off as just annoying kid nonsense, or they panic that it’s some dangerous scam that’s going to steal their kid’s identity. It’s not really either, honestly. It’s a poorly designed marketing campaign that got out of hand, preying on kids’ love of free giveaways and FOMO to get thousands of dollars worth of free promotion. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem, though. It eats up kids’ time that could be spent on homework or hanging out off screens, it clogs up the small social spaces they use to talk to each other, and it normalizes spamming as an acceptable way to get something you want. It’s also just the latest example of the random junk that pops up on kids’ social feeds every few months — new brand, new spam, same old trick.
After I sorted through Mia’s notifications that night, I tried a few things that ended up working really well, and none of it involved taking her phone away or giving her a long lecture. First, I sat down with her and walked through the giveaway page line by line, instead of just telling her it was stupid and to ignore it. We found the fine print hidden at the very bottom of the page: there was only one MacBook up for grabs across the entire country, the winner is chosen at random, and they don’t notify people who don’t win. We did rough math together: if 100,000 kids entered, that’s a 0.001% chance of winning — way worse than winning a small prize from a cereal box. She looked up at me and said, “Oh, I didn’t realize there was only one. I thought every school got one.” That 5-minute conversation was way more effective than any ban I could have imposed.
Second, we adjusted her app settings together in two minutes flat. I showed her how to turn off comment notifications from anyone she doesn’t follow, so random spammers can’t blow up her phone all day. Then we went into TikTok’s comment filtering settings and added “MASAI” to the list of blocked keywords, so any comment with that word never even shows up on her posts. If you’re a parent of a pre-teen with a public account (not that that’s allowed by the app’s terms, but we all know it happens), this takes almost no time and cuts the spam off completely before it reaches your kid.
Third, if your kid really wants to join, don’t just ban it outright — banning just makes them do it behind your back. A friend of mine set a clear, simple rule: her son can spend 10 minutes a day on the campaign if he finishes all his homework and chores before dinner. No more than that. He was bored of it after three days, and that was that.
It’s been a week and a half since we sorted out Mia’s notifications. She still gets the occasional MASAI comment that slips through the filter, but she just deletes it and moves on. Last night at dinner, she told me her best friend still posts the link every other day and thinks she’s definitely going to win. Mia didn’t argue with her, just said she knows the odds now, and that’s enough.
MASAI won’t be the last spam campaign to hit kids’ social feeds. There will be another one next month, another new brand, another giveaway with a million entries and one prize. For now, we’ve got a system that works, and we’ve got practice talking through how these campaigns pull kids in, which is way more useful than any lecture I could give. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough.
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