TikTok acts as a gateway to pornography for teens

Social media platform TikTok has been serving sexually suggestive content to teens that direct users to pornographic sites such as OnlyFans.

Research by Revealing Reality found that teenagers aged 14 or 15 were being shown videos designed to push people toward other explicit sites. Although the videos on TikTok do not show nudity, they are clearly sexual in nature, but stay just within the bounds of the platform’s rules to prevent being banned.

Experts have called this TikTok genre ‘OnlyFans funnel content’. Users are shown revealing and suggestive videos which then direct the viewer to explicit sites such as OnlyFans. Some videos feature women in revealing clothing doing sexualised dance moves; others mimic pornographic content while staying within TikTok’s guidelines.

Teen accounts on TikTok do not show links to adult content. However, creators use indirect routes to funnel viewers to their sites. Often this involves linking from TikTok to Instagram, which then directs to a landing page containing links to OnlyFans and other sites. This indirect method of linking makes it harder to identify the accounts as funnelling content to explicit sites. Revealing Reality’s research also found similar problems with other platforms such as YouTube and Snapchat.

Baroness Bertin, who led an independent review into pornography which was published last year, told The Times: “I think you’ve got to remove children from the platform and make it clear to parents and to everyone that the content isn’t safe for children, certainly under-16s and possibly even under-18s for certain content. There does have to be a much more proactive regulatory response which acts quickly when content oversteps the mark.”

She added: “There has to be some sort of human judgment call on that. We’ve got the criminal law in a much better place but it actually has to be enforced, and we also have to have much better regulation that bridges that slightly greyer area.”

Labour MP Jess Asato said: “Despite strong age restrictions on pornography, this research shows that social media platforms are still showing sexualised content to children. That’s why the government’s social media ban needs to stay on track to ensure children can be protected. In the meantime platforms need to make sure they are safe by design — removing algorithmic suggestions based on sexualised content would be a good start. If the algorithm can recognise it, designers could stop it.”