TikTok allegedly has child sex abuse material hiding in plain sight all over the social media platform, according to a Forbes investigative report.
According to the report, graphic social media content depicting lewd and pornographic acts from minors is easy to come across on the video-sharing app.
“They typically read like advertisements and come from seemingly innocuous accounts,” Forbes reports. “But often, they’re portals to illegal child sexual abuse material quite literally hidden in plain sight—posted in private accounts using a setting that makes it visible only to the person logged in.”
The grotesque material can be found in “post-in-private” accounts, which predators easily access using specific phrases to avoid algorithms that would lead to a violation.
According to Forbes, Seara Adair, child sexual abuse survivor and children’s safety advocate, told a TikTok employee that she believes users bypass the AI system by posting a few seconds of a black screen.
“There’s quite literally accounts that are full of child abuse and exploitation material on their platform,” Adair told Forbes. “Not only does it happen on their platform, but quite often it leads to other platforms – where it becomes even more dangerous.”
Adair claims to have seen videos showing “a child completely naked and doing indecent things.”
A Forbes investigator reports several of the post-in-private handles were easy to access, others would require pledges to contribute images, and some recruited girls at least 13 years old.
Mahsau Cullinane, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in an email to Forbes that the platform has “zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material and this abhorrent behavior which is strictly prohibited on our platform.” adding that the company has every public and private video posted on the platform go through TikTok’s AI moderation and additional human review, if needed.
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