TikTok: a lesson in irresponsibility

TikTok’s story is like many others on the web: an app to ​​record short music videos using simple editing tools and offering all kinds of incentives and competition goes viral and is downloaded in record numbers in several countries, becoming the most valuable startup in the world, ahead of Uber.

Along the way, an acquisition and consolidation, a lot of expectation, from competing in some areas with the all-powerful WeChat super-app to becoming, according to some, the future of the music industry.

So far, so good. Any problem? Well, there is the small matter that most TikTok users are girls 13 or less who record themselves dancing and lip syncing to their favorite songs, often trying to be the most provocative or daring. Sure, data is hard to find: these apps publish very little data on their demographics and the under-13 segment tends to lie when they register or don’t even have their own profile in the app stores or use devices in their parent or siblings’ name… But in the case of TikTok all you have to do is look at many of its videos. Now, if you put a whole bunch of videos of pubescent girls dancing to their favorite music on a social network with recommendation tools it’s going to become a magnet for sexual predators who are likely to try to contact them through the app’s chat feature; what’s more, it even helps users find videos of a certain type.