TikTok is profiting from sexual livestreams performed by teens as young as 15, the BBC has been told.
We spoke to three women in Kenya who said they began this activity as teenagers. They told us they used TikTok to openly advertise and negotiate payment for more explicit content that would be sent via other messaging platforms.
TikTok bans solicitation but the company knows it takes place, moderators have told the BBC. TikTok takes a cut of about 70 percent from all livestream transactions, we have previously found.
TikTok told the BBC it has “zero tolerance for exploitation”.
Livestreams from Kenya are popular on TikTok – each night over the course of a week, we found up to a dozen in which women performers danced suggestively, watched by hundreds of people around the world.
It’s two o’clock in the morning in Nairobi, and the TikTok Lives are in full flow.
Music blasts, and users chat over each other, as a woman turns her camera on to twerk or pose provocatively. Emoji “gifts” then fill the screen.
“Inbox me for kinembe guys. Tap, tap,” the performers say on repeat. “Tap, tap,” is a phrase commonly used on TikTok, calling for viewers to “like” a livestream.
“Kinembe” is Swahili for “clitoris”. “Inbox me” instructs the viewer to send a private message over TikTok with a more explicit bespoke request – such as to watch the performer masturbating, stripping or performing sexual activities with other women.
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In some of the livestreams we watched, coded sexual slang was used to advertise sexual services.
The emoji gifts act as payment for the TikTok livestreams and – because TikTok removes any obvious sexual acts and nudity – also the more explicit content sent later on other platforms. The gifts can be converted into cash.
“It’s not in TikTok’s interest to clamp down on soliciting of sex – the more people give gifts on a livestream… (the) more revenue for TikTok,” says a Kenyan former moderator we are calling Jo – one of more than 40,000 moderators TikTok says it employs globally.
Jo, who worked for Teleperformance – contracted by TikTok to provide content moderation – says moderators are given a reference guide of banned sexual words or actions.
But this guide is restrictive, says Jo, and does not take into account slang or other provocative gestures.
“You can see by the way they are posing, with the camera on their cleavage and thighs [for example], that they are soliciting sex.
They may not say anything, but you can see they are signposting to their [other platform] account, but there’s nothing I can do.”
