For years, social media platforms and YouTube have been criticized for quietly serving explicit material to users. In one of the most recent instances, Meta was found running Instagram ads that promoted child sexual abuse material, some of them featuring AI-generated imagery, and was ordered by the Indian government to take them down. But there are plenty of other ways that sexually explicit material is promoted through seemingly harmless social media apps. The latest addition to this sordid chain of events is TikTok.
According to research conducted by the UK’s Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation (CEASE) and Australia’s Collective Shout, TikTok has become a funnel for promoting adult content hosted on platforms such as OnlyFans. Titled “The TikTok to OnlyFans Pipeline: How TikTok is promoting, normalising and glamourising the sex industry,” the report is the result of a year-long investigation into how OnlyFans is being normalized on the platform.
“After more than a year immersed on the platform, I’ve concluded that TikTok acts as an industrial-scale digital pimp, funnelling girls into the sex industry through a frictionless pipeline,” Melinda Tankard Reist, Movement Director at Collective Shout, said in a press statement.
