TikTok Livestream Facilitates Sexual Exploitation of Minors, Experts Say
Experts warn that TikTok Live, a feature of the Chinese-owned app that allows users and creators to interact in real-time, is becoming a breeding ground for the sexual exploitation of young girls.
While TikTok is supposed to impose age restrictions on hosting livestreams and sending or receiving gifts, many kids are slipping through the cracks and participating in online transactions with adults that involve virtual sexual favors, Forbes found. The livestream feature can foster an environment ripe for grooming and sextortion that happens offline, top legal, law enforcement, and children’s safety experts told the magazine.
Predators may pressure targets to share sexually suggestive or fetishizing images of themselves or perform what is basically a strip tease live on camera, compensating them with emojis, tokens, crypto currency, or other forms of money and gifts.
Austin Berrier, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who specializes in live-streamed cyber crimes and child sexual abuse, notes that sometimes monetization is “through tokens or flowers or stupid little emojis,” so it doesn’t always raise alarm bells among parents.
These predators, many of them older men, can gradually form a relationship with victims, leveraging that virtual connection to lure them into a private chat room to request more sexually explicit content or even a physical sexual encounter. Some commenters use code words and euphemisms to elicit certain acts, which can evade TikTok surveillance and make content policing more difficult.
“That’s how it starts,” John Shehan, a vice president at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, told Forbes. These interactions can “quickly go from images of the feet, whether there’s monetary compensation or just the fact that they’re willing to take those images, that move off-platform into other platforms or other environments where they continue to ask for additional photographs, more sexually suggestive, that then very quickly turn into pornographic images,” he said. “And then before you know it, it’s a sextortion case.”
TikTok has an age requirement that users be at least 18 in order to send or receive gifts through Live that can be exchanged for money. Users under 16 are supposed to be prohibited from hosting livestreams entirely, according to company rules.
A company spokesperson claimed to Forbes that “TikTok has robust policies and measures to help protect the safety and well-being of teens,” including enforcing a “private” status for accounts under age 16 and barring those children from using direct messaging. “We immediately revoke access to features if we find accounts that do not meet our age requirements.”
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity for internet platforms for hosting and moderating third-party content, could be providing a cover for TikTok to host online sessions of a borderline pornographic nature that would ordinarily be illegal for a regular business.
Former federal prosecutor Mary Graw Leary told the magazine that “the fundamental problem of Section 230” is that these “harms” are allowed to fly below the radar without risk of litigation just because they’re happening online.
The problem of potential child endangerment and exploitation being facilitated by TikTok is compounded by the fact that the content can proliferate across cyberspace with a screenshot and the touch of a “send” button.
“The challenge is: it goes all over the world after that,” Peter Gentala, senior legal counsel at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told Forbes. The perpetrators on livestreams may “abuse in the moment, screen capture, then use that for their own purposes afterwards and make other money for it on the Internet, whether it’s dark web or other places where it’s openly traded.”
