BBC | 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% 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.
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 its empolys globally.
We discovered that TikTok is still taking about a 70% cut from live stream gifts. The company denied it took such a large commission after we established the same cut in a 2022 investigation.
TikTok has long been aware of child exploitation in its live streams – having run its own internal investigation in 2022 – but ignored the issue because it “profited significantly” from them, according to the claims of a lawsuit brought by the US state of Utah last year.
TikTok responded that the lawsuit – which is ongoing – ignored the “proactive measures” it had made to improve safety.
Kenya is a hotspot for this abuse, says the charity ChildFund Kenya, compounded by a young demographic and widespread internet usage. The African continent as a whole also has poor online moderation compared to Western countries, the charity added.
