Financial Times: US is investigating TikTok over lack of child abuse control
Two bodies of the US government are said to have launched an investigation into child abuse on TikTok. The Chinese social medium would do too little against grooming and a privacy exploit for child abuse could be actively used.
The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security would be investigating alleged child abuse on TikTok, according to those involved. reports Financial Times. For the time being, none of the parties has confirmed that an investigation is underway, which is customary according to the newspaper.
The Department of Homeland Security is said to be investigating how TikTok and parent company ByteDance are handling child abuse content. There are over 10,000 moderators employed by TikTok, but too much content would be uploaded to effectively check for any unwanted content. At the time of writing, the platform has over a billion users worldwide.
An expert from the government body on child abuse told the Financial Times that TikTok is the “preferred platform” for “sexual predators” seeking victims. Also grooming, building a relationship with a child with abuse as the ultimate goal, would be too easy via the social medium. “We want that [bedrijven] act proactively in preventing child exploitation and abuse on social media. I can’t say this [in het geval van TikTok] happens.”
The Department of Justice is investigating whether and how a specific privacy function of TikTok could be abused to share illegal content. According to the researchers, the Only Me function would be used among malicious users to share child abuse accounts. Code words would even be placed under videos and in account information to signal the presence of such material.
In its own words, TikTok takes a hard line against unwanted content; 96 percent of all unwanted videos would be removed before a user can see it. By far the largest part of the removed videos would show smoking or alcohol drinking minors. It is not clear how many cases of sexual or non-sexual child abuse occur on the platform.