A group of social media influencers who partnered with Chinese fast-fashion juggernaut Shein are under fire for posting content that critics say sanitizes the poor working conditions at the retailer’s factories.

A wave of backlash began swirling on social media this week, though the videos on the influencers’ and Shein’s pages went live earlier this month. In the posts, the content creators go on a guided tour of one of the online retailer’s reported 6,000 factories in China and praise its labor practices.

“I was really excited and impressed to see the working conditions,” influencer Dani Carbonari said in a now-deleted video of the factory, applauding Shein for being such a “developed and complex company.” She then jokingly referred to herself as an “investigative journalist” and said she interviewed a woman who worked in the fabric-cutting department.

“She was very surprised at all of the rumors that have been spread in the U.S.,” Carbonari said of her exchange with the worker.

Those so-called “rumors” likely refer to media investigations and other reports about Shein’s allegedly poor working conditions. Perhaps the most damning was a report last fall by Britain’s Channel 4, which took hidden cameras inside the factory and found that employees were working 75-hour weeks, had one day off a month and earned a base pay of $20 per day. Chinese labor laws limit employees to 40 hours of work a week. Shein denies the allegations of workplace violations.

A 2021 probe by the Swiss watchdog group Public Eye resulted in similar findings. And Remake, a nonprofit that advocates for better labor and environmental practices in factories, graded Shein zero out of 150 points on its ethics rubric.

But influencers on Shein’s marketing trip pushed a different narrative.

“When I asked them questions like, ‘What does your workweek look like? How many hours do you work? What’s your commute?’ Most of them work like, 8 to 6, and their commute is like, 10-15 minutes, just like normal,” influencer Destene Sudduth said in one of her videos about the trip. “I expected this facility to just be so filled with people slaving away.”

The comments on Sudduth’s posts from the trip are filled with criticisms, with many questioning whether the visit was set up to show influencers a sanitized version of factory life.

When reached for comment on the backlash, Shein said the video series was a way for the company to be forthright about its practices.

“SHEIN is committed to transparency and this trip reflects one way in which we are listening to feedback, providing an opportunity to show a group of influencers how SHEIN works through a visit to our innovation center and enabling them to share their own insights with their followers,” the company said in a statement.

“Their social media videos and commentary are authentic, and we respect and stand by each influencer’s perspective and voice on their experience,” Shein continued. “We look forward to continuing to provide more transparency around our on-demand business model and operations.”

Shein has become one of the globe’s biggest fashion retailers in recent years, going from $10 billion in sales in 2020 to $100 billion in 2022. The company offers a staggering number of items for sale and adds thousands of new pieces of apparel to its online inventory daily.

Production that rapid, however, can be hard on the environment. A study from the Changing Markets Foundation last year found that Shein’s virgin polyester use and oil consumption produces the same amount of CO₂ as about 180 coal-fired power plants.