“What you would expect that only would be on the ‘deep web’ you find on TikTok,” considered Maldita.es.
An investigation published on Monday by Maldita.es revealed the presence of more than one thousand explicit videos of child sexual abuse on TikTok, accumulating 48 million views. Contacted by the AFP, TikTok did not react at the moment.
According to Maldita.es, TikTok removed barely 10% of the content denounced by the organization and blocked only 26% of the illegal material in Spain. The investigators also found more than 26,000 profiles of potential pedophiles exchanging or selling materials of abuse on TikTok, with 7,700 operating in Spanish.
El Gobierno @desdelamoncloa pide a la Fiscalía investigar presuntos casos de abuso infantil en @TikTok_ES ante las informaciones publicadas por los compañeros de @maldita (enhorabuena). 💬 Mi análisis en @MediodiaRNE de Carlos Núñez @Freecanusa con @ccifuentes#investigacion pic.twitter.com/43h0ZxcWUo
Despite rules prohibiting minors from conducting livestreams, the investigation identified almost a hundred of these broadcasts across 17 countries, where viewers asked children to perform acts, some of a sexual nature, in exchange for money. Maldita.es reported that the search engine of the platform, owned by the Chinese group ByteDance, has not blocked keywords related to these contents.
“Nosotros vamos a actuar con la absoluta contundencia y proporcionalmente a la gravedad de este asunto y si tenemos que suspender una red social, no le quepa duda de que lo vamos a hacer porque antes que nada están los derechos de los menores,” stated Pedro Sánchez.
Sánchez qualified the information as a “scandal” and affirmed that “hay que investigarlo” during an interview on Monday night on the channel La Séptima. The prime minister has previously shown his intention to reinforce control on social networks by prohibiting access for minors under 16 and making platform executives legally responsible for actions on their sites.
Maldita.es announced it will present a complaint before the Computer Crime unit of the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office. “Los hallazgos de esta investigación ponen muy en cuestión la efectividad de las medidas de TikTok contra el abuso de menores,” noted Maldita.es regarding obligations stipulated by the European Digital Services Act (DSA).
The European Union has undertaken an offensive to curb social networks under the DSA and aims to ban them for minors under 13 due to risks to their well-being and development.
