For thirty-five days, from 11 September to 15 October, a group of researchers in Spain watched one app. They looked at profiles, at comment threads, at live broadcasts. They opened accounts of their own to see what the machine would show them if they let it choose. Then they counted.
The count was published on Monday, 9 November, under the title “TikTok: Home to predators.” On Tuesday, as Al Jazeera reported, the Spanish government said it might suspend the platform altogether.
The arithmetic
The researchers belong to Maldita.es, a Spanish fact-checking foundation. This is its third investigation into child sexual abuse on TikTok. It found more than 1,000 videos of child sexual abuse, viewed some 48 million times in total. It found more than 20,000 profiles of suspected paedophiles, about 7,000 of them in Spanish. Once every category in the report is added together, the total comes to roughly 26,000 accounts, according to Al Jazeera and AFP, and Maldita.es handed the details to the authorities.
The report breaks the numbers down. There were 231 profiles that posted 1,183 explicit items between them, and 780 accounts that used the network to find buyers. More than 10,000 others asked, in the comments, to swap sexual images.
Behind every figure there is a child.
Maldita.es’s chief executive, Clara Jiménez Cruz, described what her team found. “Abuse is not hidden away in a little corner and it is not hard to find,” she said. The foundation put it another way: “Material you would expect to find only on the dark web is on TikTok.”
What the machine offered
The part about the algorithm is the most disturbing. Within three days, the test accounts were recommended 19 livestreams by minors, 15 of them in a single morning, all filmed at schools. One recommended broadcast showed a 10-year-old girl in Spain getting suggestive comments from an adult man while she was live.
Maldita.es also points to money. It says children are pushed into sexualised acts in return for paid virtual gifts, which viewers buy and send during the stream. TikTok keeps a share of that money, the foundation says, though how large a share is unclear. If that is right, the harm and the revenue come from the same transaction.
Fifty reports
The researchers also tested the reporting button, which every platform offers as proof that it is responsible. They flagged 50 videos containing abuse material. TikTok removed five and restricted 13 more, and the restrictions applied only in Spain. That is about a tenth taken down and about a quarter hidden from one country. Everything else stayed up for anyone outside Spain.
Maldita.es says it contacted the company before publishing and got no reply. TikTok later asked for more information, according to Euronews, but the foundation says its questions about safeguards for minors, the failures it found and the illegal material on the platform have still not been answered. TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, faces many lawsuits and investigations around the world over failing to protect minors, and it has denied those accusations.
The ministry’s answer
Spain’s Ministry of Youth and Children responded within a day of publication. It asked the Prosecutor’s Office to act, as the Spanish tech outlet Xataka reported, and said suspending TikTok in Spain was one option. The minister, Sira Rego, called an urgent meeting with the company’s leadership in the country. According to El País, she warned that if TikTok did not act urgently, the government would push for a complete ban.
Maldita.es says it will also file its own complaint with the prosecutor’s unit for computer crime. It plans to keep publishing parts of the investigation until 13 November.
Brussels has been pressing too. The previous Friday, the European Union told TikTok to change what it called the “harmful” design of its “For You” feed or risk large fines. That feed is the same machinery of recommendation that, by Maldita.es’s account, sent the test accounts to schoolchildren broadcasting from their classrooms.
Watching the watchers
A reflection, not a finding: platforms like this tend to describe themselves as neutral spaces, mirrors that show users what they ask for. Maldita.es’s test accounts asked for nothing. They waited, and the platform made its own recommendations.
A government can call meetings, write to prosecutors and threaten to switch the app off for a whole country. None of that will reach the girl in the livestream if the platform does not act. What the fifty reports showed is how little action it took when asked.