Social media giant TikTok is being investigated over how it uses children’s data – as a separate probe claimed it was earning money from live-streamed sex performances by girls aged just 15.
The China-owned video platform takes a cut of around 70% from ‘emoji gifts’ paid by men to watch shows by women in Africa, the BBC said.
Investigators watched as the women danced and twerked suggestively, watched by hundreds of people around the world.
The gifts can later be converted to cash. In some live-streams, women used coded sex slang and advertised sexual services on other platforms.
One 17-year-old in Kenya, admitted: ‘I sell myself on TikTok. I dance naked. I do that because that’s where I can earn money to support myself.’
She was just 15 when a friend showed her how to bypass age restrictions on the site to go live, Esther revealed.
The livestreams were being watched by hundreds of people (Picture: Mateusz Slodkowski/ZUMA Press Wi)
Others said they performed up to seven hours a night to make £30 – enough for a week’s food and transport.
Esther – not her real name – lives in a poor part of Nairobi, with 3,000 sharing toilet facilities.
TikTok users with large followings sometimes act as paid ‘digital pimps’ for the women – hosting live-stream sex shows while evading content moderators.
The platform says it pays around 40,000 people worldwide to check live content.
However, one former moderator told the BBC’s TikTok And The Digital Pimps: Eye Investigates: ‘It’s not in TikTok’s interest to clamp down on soliciting of sex – the more people give gifts on a live-stream the more revenue for TikTok.’
TikTok told the BBC it had ‘zero tolerance for exploitation’, adding: ‘We enforce strict safety policies, including robust Live content rules, moderation in 70 languages, including Swahili, and we partner with local experts and creators… to continually strengthen our approach.’
John Edwards, Britain’s Information Commissioner, yesterday revealed a major investigation had begun into how TikTok uses the data of 13- to 17-year-olds to recommend further content to them.
TikTok says it pays around 40,000 people worldwide to check live content.(Picture: Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/S)
He fears data leaks or actions to make children spend ‘more time than is healthy’ online may harm them.
Mr Edwards said TikTok’s algorithm ‘feeds on personal data’ gleaned from user profiles, preferences, links clicked and how long they spend watching a particular video.
The ICO said it was also checking age verification systems of news aggregator Reddit and Imgur – an image-sharing platform – to see if they were complying with UK data protection laws and the children’s code.
Platforms which collect UK children’s user data must minimise the amount they gather and take extra care when processing it.
TikTok insisted it had ‘strict and comprehensive measures to protect privacy and safety of teens’ and ‘robust restrictions on content allowed in teens’ feeds’.
Online safety regulator Ofcom launched an enforcement programme to ensure tech firms complied with the new Online Safety Act.
They must carry out risk assessments by the end of the month, setting out how likely users are to encounter illegal content.
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