San Francisco, Aug 6 : Chinese short-form video app TikTok reports that it shows sexually explicit videos of children in the course of its training for moderators of content as reported by the media.According to Forbes an unsecure cache of images of children sexually exploited was made available to third-party TikTok moderators to use as an aid to reference.
“These parents don’t know we have this image and this video, this tragedy and this crime that was averted.If they knew I’m certain they’d set fire to TikTok down.” Whitney Turner, the former moderator of TikTok was quoted as saying in the report that was released on Friday.
Turner worked for the third-party moderation firm Teleperformance’s TikTok program in El Paso, Texas.
She was provided with access to a spreadsheet shared with her “filled with material determined to be in violation of the community guidelines of TikTok and includes hundreds of images of children naked or abused”.
The document, which is referred to as Daily Required Reading (DRR) “was easily accessible to employees of Teleperformance and TikTok in the last summer”.
Sources informed Forbes that there were hundreds of employees of both companies had access to the documents.
“The DRR, along with other materials for training were kept in Lark internal workplace software created by TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance,” the report noted.
Whitney even reported the incident even to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) but it was not a success.
A TikTok spokesperson stated that the “training materials are subject to strict access control and do not contain illustrations of CSAM (child sexual assault material)”.
The spokesperson stated that the company works with third-party companies “who might have their own procedures”.
Teleperformance has also claimed that it never displayed employees content that was sexually exploitative.
The report noted that Teleperformance provided employees with graphic images and videos to provide an example of what to put on TikTok.
“I have one daughter and I don’t think it’s right.
Just a lot of people viewing this,” another former Teleperformance employee Nasser was quoted as saying.
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