- Oct 17, 2011
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In late July and early August this year, researchers from campaign group Global Witness set up four accounts on TikTok pretending to be 13-year-olds.
They also turned on the platform's "restricted mode", which TikTok says prevents users seeing "mature or complex themes, such as… sexually suggestive content".
Without doing any searches themselves, investigators found overtly sexualised search terms being recommended in the "you may like" section of the app.
At its most extreme, the content included explicit pornographic films of penetrative sex.
These videos were embedded in other innocent content in a successful attempt to avoid content moderation.
Ava Lee from Global Witness said the findings came as a "huge shock" to researchers.
"TikTok isn't just failing to prevent children from accessing inappropriate content - it's suggesting it to them as soon as they create an account".
They informed TikTok, which said it had taken immediate action to resolve the problem.
But in late July and August this year, the campaign group repeated the exercise and found once again that the app was recommending sexual content.
They also turned on the platform's "restricted mode", which TikTok says prevents users seeing "mature or complex themes, such as… sexually suggestive content".
Without doing any searches themselves, investigators found overtly sexualised search terms being recommended in the "you may like" section of the app.
At its most extreme, the content included explicit pornographic films of penetrative sex.
These videos were embedded in other innocent content in a successful attempt to avoid content moderation.
Ava Lee from Global Witness said the findings came as a "huge shock" to researchers.
"TikTok isn't just failing to prevent children from accessing inappropriate content - it's suggesting it to them as soon as they create an account".
They informed TikTok, which said it had taken immediate action to resolve the problem.
But in late July and August this year, the campaign group repeated the exercise and found once again that the app was recommending sexual content.
