TikTok has very quickly become one of the largest social media platforms.
Sadly, with all that success came a major problem with child exploitation. The Post Millennial reports that TikTok is wildly popular with children and teenagers, which has also attracted those who want to exploit those teenagers and children.
The Post Millennial reports that a 42-year-old man in Alabama is currently on trial for the sexual exploitation of a 14-year-girl on TikTok. It is unclear precisely what the source of the allegations is or how the adult man allegedly exploited the girl.
His TikTok account was deactivated when The Wall Street Journal began to seek information on this case. This seems to be taking away from the possibility of getting the information about what allegedly happened in this case because the man from Alabama had his account suspended.
The Post Millennial reports that The Department of Homeland Security's Erin Burke reports that TikTok has become a magnet for predators because they find the platform a helpful way to find the children and teenagers they want to exploit.
Many of the videos on TikTok are of children doing fun and trendy dances. As other children begin to watch those videos, the algorithms that power TikTok teach it to feed even more of those videos to other children who are watching them. However, that algorithm also helps feed more of these videos to the predators who might also watch them.
The Wall Street Journal reports that TikTok makes it easier for predators to find vulnerable children via the platform. It is just video after video of children being fed up with the predators. It is known that when adults watch videos of children doing these dances, they will be fed even more videos.
The Post Millennial reports that TikTok allows users to create private channels and can only be seen by friends and family. However, many TikTok users do not choose to use those privacy settings. Instead, it is far more common for users to leave their videos open to the public; that is where the danger comes in. Children are particularly likely to leave their channels open as they may need to learn about the dangers of leaving the channel open. Therefore, their videos can be served to predators. That is something that should scare all parents and everyone else as well.
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