Speaker 1: It's the Big Take from Bloomberg News and iHeart Radio.
Speaker 1: I'm West Cosova. Today our second look at TikTok, this
Speaker 1: time through the eyes of a teen influencer. In November,
Speaker 1: Bloomberg investigative reporter Olivia Carville came on the podcast. She
Speaker 1: told the story of children who have died copying challenges
Speaker 1: that can be seen on TikTok, the enormously popular video
Speaker 1: social platform that has more than a billion users around
Speaker 1: the world. TikTok doesn't want those videos on its app,
Speaker 1: and it tries to find and delete them. As Olivia
Speaker 1: dug deeper into TikTok's culture, she discovered another vast corner
Speaker 1: of the app where young video creators pushed the boundary
Speaker 1: in a different way, and where the decisions the company
Speaker 1: makes about what videos to take down and which one
Speaker 1: is to leave up aren't is clear cut. I asked
Speaker 1: Olivia to come back on the show to talk about
Speaker 1: what she calls teen TikTok. Well, teen TikTok is a complicated,
Speaker 1: sometimes scary, very strange world. You can go into rabbit
Speaker 1: holes using TikTok looking at all the content that pops up,
Speaker 1: and some of it is really cool. And uplifting and fun.
Speaker 1: Hence some of it is just downright frightening. For the story,
Speaker 1: I was focused on the hyper sexualization of minors, and
Speaker 1: I was looking at how TikTok as a platform moderates
Speaker 1: content from mainly young girls hosting very sexually suggestive videos.
Speaker 1: In her second story about TikTok for Bloomberg Business Week,
Speaker 1: Olivia writes about a hugely popular teen TikTok star. She's
Speaker 1: a sixteen year old girl who lives in Florida. Her
Speaker 1: name is Rosalie Eritola on TikTok, though she goes by
Speaker 1: a different name, Jenny Papach. That's how are millions of
Speaker 1: followers know her. You'll hear us use both these names
Speaker 1: throughout this episode. Hi, my name is Rosie Utola. Many
Speaker 1: people may know me as Jenny Papa as well, and
Speaker 1: I am a content creator on TikTok and Instagram. She's
Speaker 1: pretty sessy, she's you know, some of her content is
Speaker 1: quite funny. She likes to poke fun at people. She's
Speaker 1: quite bold, quite brazen for a young teenage girl. She
Speaker 1: pushes back when people criticize her for wearing certain clothes
Speaker 1: or dancing in a certain way. Or posting content with
Speaker 1: sexually explicit lyrics, and she's actually come one of the
Speaker 1: most controversial teen stars on the platform. If someone goes
Speaker 1: on her account, what sort of videos are they likely
Speaker 1: to see there? If you were to open the Jenny
Speaker 1: pop pett account right now, you would see a sixteen
Speaker 1: year old girl who is posting videos of her daily life.
Speaker 1: And many of her clips she's dancing or lip sinking
Speaker 1: or joking, or she's acting the full or dressing up
Speaker 1: or playing with her brothers and her parents. But if
Speaker 1: you start scrolling through her content and really looking at
Speaker 1: the captions, looking at what she's saying, looking at some
Speaker 1: of the sexual innu window that she's inserting into those captions,
Speaker 1: or listening to the lyrics of the songs that she's
Speaker 1: lip sinking too, or looking at some of the clothing
Speaker 1: choices that she's wearing, or the style of dance that
Speaker 1: she's doing. What Jenny Pope Petch has really been doing
Speaker 1: is leaning in to this kind of bad girl persona
Speaker 1: or trying to post content that contains shock value, And
Speaker 1: from her perspective, shock value is doing what you can
Speaker 1: to get the audience talking, to get them to pause
Speaker 1: and rewatch and comment on your video because Rosaliera Toland
Speaker 1: knows that's going to get her more popularity on TikTok.
Speaker 1: That's what the algorithm wants. Content that is controversial, shocking
Speaker 1: that people are going to want to talk about. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what she's been posting for the last few years.
Speaker 1: For pretty much her whole life, she's wanted to become
Speaker 1: social media famous. She was quite a good belly dancer
Speaker 1: when she was quite a young child, and she would
Speaker 1: perform on Musically in Musically was bought by Bite Dance,
Speaker 1: which is the owner of TikTok, and suddenly those young
Speaker 1: video makers and musically at a far bigger stage, you know.
Speaker 1: But I didn't have any intention of like getting bigger
Speaker 1: or anything. It kind of just started to happen when
Speaker 1: I do ddit. This girl Leah Leah Louie, she was
Speaker 1: a contact creator on Musically belly Dancer, and then I
Speaker 1: became this like persona of mini Leah Louis, so I
Speaker 1: was like the mini version of her, and that was
Speaker 1: like really pushed out and then that began to be
Speaker 1: like my niche and what everybody was watching me for.
Speaker 1: And then I have my own set of videos where
Speaker 1: I was really dancing and I kind of just started
Speaker 1: really out, like twelve, and when you got up to
Speaker 1: three million views, how old were you at the time,
Speaker 1: I was twelve. When you look at the Genie Pope
Speaker 1: pech profile on TikTok today, she's got almost seven million followers,
Speaker 1: which is a huge number for a sixteen year old girl.
Speaker 1: Do we know who's watching these videos? Are the other teens?
Speaker 1: Are the adults? I think about of Jennie Pope as
Speaker 1: followers male, And when you look in the adult and
Speaker 1: rage of her followers more than fifty men, So she
Speaker 1: has hundreds of thousands of adult men watching her content
Speaker 1: on a daily basis. I really try not to read
Speaker 1: those comments from the Alderman, but when I do see them,
Speaker 1: I kind of just like uncomfortable, and I'll give the
Speaker 1: phone to my mom and she'll just delete it, or
Speaker 1: I'll delete it and I'll just move past and forget
Speaker 1: about it, because I'm just like, I don't want to
Speaker 1: have that energy in my life. Give us a PG.
Speaker 1: Thirteen version of some of the comments you get that
Speaker 1: would make you feel uncomfortable. You were with me right now,
Speaker 1: I would do this and that to you, okay, right
Speaker 1: around now, you might be asking yourself, what do Rosalie's
Speaker 1: parents think about all this? Olivia told me she went
Speaker 1: to Florida to meet Rosalie and her family. When it
Speaker 1: comes to Rosalie Eritoler, not only is her mother watching,
Speaker 1: her mother's actually encouraging her. How did this account become,
Speaker 1: you know, so famous and also so contraver herschel at
Speaker 1: the same time. And that controversy, a lot of it
Speaker 1: stems from the relationship that she has with her mother,
Speaker 1: which is included in a lot of her TikTok post
Speaker 1: Sometimes her mom is dancing just as suggestively alongside Rosalie
Speaker 1: in the Jennie Pope patch account. And I think that
Speaker 1: her mom is really instrumental in the Jenny Pope Patch
Speaker 1: account and has helped build it to you know, reaching
Speaker 1: seven million followers, helping her choose her outfits, driving her
Speaker 1: to swanky locations to film in like the Ritz Carlton,
Speaker 1: allowing her to drop out of school and be homeschooled
Speaker 1: so she can focus on her TikTok career. My name
Speaker 1: is Mario. Last year, I am forty two years old. Um,
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm twenty two. I have six kids,
Speaker 1: and I'm the mother of Jenni per Patch, my amazing daughter,
Speaker 1: you know. I I said to her, does it bother
Speaker 1: you that your daughter, at the age of ten had
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand followers online who were watching her do
Speaker 1: belly dancing videos. And she said, no, it didn't bother
Speaker 1: me at all, she said, she reveled in it. In
Speaker 1: the back of my mind for many many years, I
Speaker 1: was like, I'm going to be famous. But it kind
Speaker 1: of was like my my ship had had sailed in
Speaker 1: that sense, you know. And so I believe in destiny,
Speaker 1: and I believe in manifestation, and I believe that Rosalie
Speaker 1: is that just how does this type of fame happen?
Speaker 1: By the age of thirteen, Rosalie and her mother really
Speaker 1: wanted to help her become a bona fide influencer. They
Speaker 1: wanted her to become social media famous, and the best
Speaker 1: way to do that, they thought, was to fly out
Speaker 1: to l a and try and come up with a
Speaker 1: similar concept to the hype house. For those who are
Speaker 1: listening who may not understand what the hype houses, which
Speaker 1: I assume as a lot of people out there, This
Speaker 1: was a mansion in California, where the most popular TikTok
Speaker 1: stars in the world would well in America at least,
Speaker 1: would live in together to film content and help one
Speaker 1: another's accounts grow. So there was a bunch of teenagers
Speaker 1: just filming TikTok's in this mansion in California, and Rosalie
Speaker 1: and her mom flew out and decided that they wanted
Speaker 1: to make a hype house for minors. She was only
Speaker 1: thirteen at the time, so they wanted to create a
Speaker 1: similar concept with a bunch of twelve thirteen year olds
Speaker 1: who had big TikTok following and all lived together in
Speaker 1: a home and build content. What they did is they
Speaker 1: actually sneaked into the original hype House and filmed videos
Speaker 1: from the bathrooms and balconies, the places that her own
Speaker 1: idols had really immortalized on TikTok, and those videos viral.
Speaker 1: This resulted in the Jenny Poet account really blowing up,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately for the wrong reasons. At that time, people
Speaker 1: criticized her for breaking into the hype House, for stalking
Speaker 1: the hype House creators, for stealing their clothes. One of
Speaker 1: these creators, who had millions of followers, said that she
Speaker 1: flushed his fish down the toilet. She denied all of
Speaker 1: this and said that a caretaker had led her into
Speaker 1: the property. But that controversy really propelled her account to
Speaker 1: reach more than a million followers for the first time,
Speaker 1: and that taught her to lean into this bad girl
Speaker 1: persona to post content that's controversial, it's risky that other
Speaker 1: people aren't posting, and she quickly realized, you know, that's
Speaker 1: the way to become an influencer. So after that moment,
Speaker 1: her content dramatically changed and it became a lot more
Speaker 1: you know, sexual, new window and her captions, her dance
Speaker 1: moves were more suggestive, her clothing was more revealing, and
Speaker 1: she was really gaming the algorithm in a way. She
Speaker 1: knew that she would be rewarded if she posted content
Speaker 1: that got people talking, so the algorithm actually incentivized her
Speaker 1: to behave in this way and rewarded her by doing so.
Speaker 1: So then if we fast forward to what her account
Speaker 1: is like now as a sixteen year old, she's posting
Speaker 1: content that to her is kind of normalized. This is
Speaker 1: what she's been doing for years, and she doesn't think
Speaker 1: there's anything wrong with it. Where is Rosalie's father in
Speaker 1: all of this? Rosalie's father is there. He's present, He's
Speaker 1: in some of her clips. Her most successful TikTok post
Speaker 1: is actually her doing quite a sexually suggestive dance and
Speaker 1: he picks her up and carries her out of the frame,
Speaker 1: acting as though he's shocked by what she's doing. That
Speaker 1: got a hundred and sixty million views on tick too,
Speaker 1: and her dad is supporting her. He's proud of her.
Speaker 1: He thinks that if this is going to help her
Speaker 1: make money, get her through college, make her a bit
Speaker 1: of person, then why not you heard Olivia mentioned money
Speaker 1: just now. That's another element of this story. Creators can't
Speaker 1: receive money directly from TikTok unless they're over the age
Speaker 1: of eighteen, but some brands are eager to capitalize on
Speaker 1: their fame and reach their followers. Yeah, tein talk is
Speaker 1: big business. These influences are making tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars a
Speaker 1: month because their following is so big. So Rosalie Ertoler
Speaker 1: has brand deals with a number of fashion outlets, from
Speaker 1: Fashion Over to she in Too Pretty Little Thing. She
Speaker 1: just released a clothing line with empty soda. She's got
Speaker 1: a little baby pink miniskirt with a matching top with
Speaker 1: a cutout love heart in the middle, and she's advertised
Speaker 1: using it on TikTok and encouraging her followers, her seven
Speaker 1: million followers to go and buy it. Is part of
Speaker 1: the encouragement that Rosalie gets from her parents, the money
Speaker 1: that she makes from this. I remember asking Maria about
Speaker 1: that directly, and she said, the first time they got
Speaker 1: a brand deal, she actually ran into Rosalie's room screaming,
Speaker 1: we made it. You know what I mean, We made
Speaker 1: it like ten you know, ten grand for five posts.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's insane, dude. Um, it's the norm for me.
Speaker 1: Now it's the norm for us. You know, We've got
Speaker 1: this ten thousand dollar brand deal. This means that you're
Speaker 1: an influencer and everyone was wrong and we did it.
Speaker 1: And they feel as though they had finally achieved a
Speaker 1: huge milestone in life. Usually I make from a company,
Speaker 1: what I make from a company is maybe like tens
Speaker 1: of fifteen, depending on how much they're willing to pay.
Speaker 1: And then and that's not for like some promos. That's
Speaker 1: like brand deals like clothing brands and promoting like a
Speaker 1: product or something, and then um and total. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how much I've made over the past year, but
Speaker 1: I know right now in my seevings I have like
Speaker 1: about thirty safter So these fashion companies actually stand to
Speaker 1: make a lot of money from creators like Rosalieeritola or
Speaker 1: you know her Jenny Pope patch account, because it's a
Speaker 1: brilliant marketing strategy to encourage the creators themselves to be
Speaker 1: your advertisement. No longer do we have to pay for
Speaker 1: television advertisements. You can just pay a creator like Jenny
Speaker 1: Pope Petch to wear a dress in one of her videos,
Speaker 1: and seven million people are going to see it, and
Speaker 1: they're going to want to be like her. They're going
Speaker 1: to want to be wearing the clothes that she's wearing,
Speaker 1: and maybe they're going to go and buy that item
Speaker 1: when we come back. I talked to Olivia about some
Speaker 1: of the people who aren't such big fans of Jenny
Speaker 1: Popatch and her fame, and what life is like for
Speaker 1: the kid behind the persona. We've heard Olivia describe how
Speaker 1: Jenny Papach is a larger than life character in her
Speaker 1: videos on TikTok, but just how does this play out
Speaker 1: in the day to day real life of Rosalie Aratola.
Speaker 1: I've been looking at her posts for months before I
Speaker 1: traveled down there, and I've been seeing a lot of
Speaker 1: comments on her posts from concerned followers, people who genuinely
Speaker 1: believed that her life was in danger. They thought that
Speaker 1: she had been kidnapped, or that she was being stalked,
Speaker 1: or that her parents were forcing her to perform in
Speaker 1: this way. People are convinced that in some of her videos,
Speaker 1: she's actually mouthing the words help to her audience before
Speaker 1: she starts dancing. And as I was looking through this account,
Speaker 1: reading these comments, I decided that I actually wanted to
Speaker 1: get a sense of who she was and where does
Speaker 1: this controversy stem from, and what does she think about
Speaker 1: all this? And I was quite surprised at the girl
Speaker 1: that I met. She was very eloquent, very well spoken.
Speaker 1: I assumed by watching her content that she was going
Speaker 1: to open the door in a skin type body suit
Speaker 1: or a mini skirt with her two inch fake nails on,
Speaker 1: and you know, her hair extensions in and a full
Speaker 1: face of makeup. But she was in this baggy hoodie.
Speaker 1: She hadn't even brushed her here, She had no makeup
Speaker 1: on she was very natural. She looked like a child.
Speaker 1: She looked a lot younger than what she does in
Speaker 1: her content on TikTok Um. Some of the pros and
Speaker 1: cons of being an influencer was like a lot of
Speaker 1: followers six seven billion, you don't really know who to
Speaker 1: trust as far. I feel like it's just very hard
Speaker 1: to create genuine friendships, and it's hard to feel like
Speaker 1: you even have genuine and that everything is now transactional.
Speaker 1: It's been quite challenging for her to actually make friends.
Speaker 1: She feels as though anyone who is nice to her
Speaker 1: and tries to befriend her is only doing so because
Speaker 1: they want to increase their own following. They want to
Speaker 1: be in a video with Jenny Pope Patch and you know,
Speaker 1: use her effectively. Well, I feel like it's easy for Jenny.
Speaker 1: I'm just kidding. I mean, I find it easier to
Speaker 1: find collaborators, but I don't consider every person I collab
Speaker 1: with a friend because I feel like a friend is
Speaker 1: somebody you call and you hang out with them every day,
Speaker 1: and you trust them and you feel like you can
Speaker 1: trust them with your personal experiences and your personal thoughts,
Speaker 1: and you're not afraid to be yourself with them, and
Speaker 1: I don't find myself like that with a lot of
Speaker 1: the people I collab with. And when I saw her
Speaker 1: personality online, she comes across as confident, outgoing, empowered, aware
Speaker 1: of who she is and what she wants in life,
Speaker 1: but when you meet her in person, she's less sure
Speaker 1: of herself. She mentioned that she has seven million followers
Speaker 1: but no real friends. What does TikTok say about the
Speaker 1: guidelines about Jenny's account and about making decisions about where
Speaker 1: to leave up and what to take down. TikTok says,
Speaker 1: it's guidelines are really clear and it's not wrong. You
Speaker 1: can go on to its website and you can open
Speaker 1: up the minor safety tab and see the specificity that
Speaker 1: it goes into on its guidelines. TikTok doesn't comment on
Speaker 1: individual accounts for privacy reasons, so it wouldn't make any
Speaker 1: comment about the Jennie Poe Patch account or tell me
Speaker 1: why it deactivated her account twice where it reactivated it twice.
Speaker 1: TikTok didn't want to weigh in on that, but it
Speaker 1: says that it has very strict minor safety policies and
Speaker 1: it encourages all of its content moderate is to abide
Speaker 1: by them. We'll hear more a bit later about what
Speaker 1: the company does to enforce those guidelines, But there are
Speaker 1: any number of so called vigilante parents on the platform
Speaker 1: who have taken it upon themselves to try to police TikTok.
Speaker 1: They flag videos they say violate the apps rules once
Speaker 1: they feel our inappropriate content from minor to make and
Speaker 1: for other kids and adults to be looking at. She's
Speaker 1: also caught the attention of vigilantes or watchdog moms or
Speaker 1: other creators who are scanning through TikTok looking for content
Speaker 1: that highlights the dark side of influencer culture, that highlights
Speaker 1: child exploitation on the air, and they are holding up
Speaker 1: this Jenny Popetch account as an example of a young
Speaker 1: creator who is doing inappropriate things and being rewarded by
Speaker 1: TikTok's algorithm, which is pushing her onto the for you
Speaker 1: page and increasing her popularity, increasing her fame, increasing her followers,
Speaker 1: which in turn is resulting in her getting more and
Speaker 1: more brand deals from fashion companies, more money, more fame,
Speaker 1: and so it goes on. One of those people is
Speaker 1: a woman named Sarah Adams. She's a mom who's gotten
Speaker 1: quite a TikTok following herself for calling out what she
Speaker 1: sees as problematic videos by Jenny Papa and other TikTok stars.
Speaker 1: Olivia went to talk to her. I'm Sarah Adams. I
Speaker 1: live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I am mom
Speaker 1: uncharted on tiktar. She's calling out not only the specific
Speaker 1: accounts like the Jinny Pope petch account, but the parents,
Speaker 1: the brands that are paying her, and the platforms like TikTok.
Speaker 1: Why are you allowing this kind of content to stay up? Um?
Speaker 1: I look at a lot of different issues, Um. The
Speaker 1: three main ones that I always discuss our issues of privacy,
Speaker 1: informed consent and safety. And the safety kind of goes
Speaker 1: alongside with the sexualization of our young children. I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of sexualized content in regard to song choices,
Speaker 1: style of dances, clothing poses. You know, it's not just clothing,
Speaker 1: it's the clothing paired with the situation and the lyrics
Speaker 1: and the dance moves. It's all of it. And a
Speaker 1: lot of Sarah Adams posts she calls TikTok out for
Speaker 1: not upholding it's minus safety guidelines and the most ironic
Speaker 1: thing is that her own videos are actually being removed
Speaker 1: for minus safety violations, but the original video she's posting
Speaker 1: about will remain up. You mean they're being removed because
Speaker 1: she's pointing to videos and on the basis of that content,
Speaker 1: which hasn't been removed, her account is being remove That's right,
Speaker 1: her account, her videos are being removed for highlighting what
Speaker 1: she believes is problematic content being produced by children. I
Speaker 1: am not sexualizing a child. I am letting you know
Speaker 1: as a parent that there are people who are sexualizing
Speaker 1: your children. And this is a public platform with a
Speaker 1: billion people, including the worst of society. And what does
Speaker 1: Rosalie say about this criticism. She feels as though people
Speaker 1: are unfairly judging her and that she should be able
Speaker 1: to do what she wants to do on the app.
Speaker 1: She thinks that other creators who are highlighting her content
Speaker 1: is problematic are actually sabotaging her career. And I think
Speaker 1: it's really important to try and understand what these creators,
Speaker 1: like Rosaliera tolder. What is the intention behind the posts?
Speaker 1: Is she posting her content to try and be sexually
Speaker 1: appealing or is she posting her content because that's who
Speaker 1: she is? And this is what fifteen and sixteen year
Speaker 1: old girls are doing. Now. This is kind of normalized
Speaker 1: for this age group. And the question I suppose is
Speaker 1: does she understand the full implications of what she's doing
Speaker 1: or does she not. From talking to Rosalie Aritoler, I
Speaker 1: think she is aware of what she's posting. I think
Speaker 1: she knows what she's doing, she knows what she's selling.
Speaker 1: She's a very smart teenage girl, and she enjoys the fame.
Speaker 1: She mentioned to me that she got over three point
Speaker 1: four million likes when she posted a video wearing Christmas
Speaker 1: onesie and how exciting that was to her. TikTok. To
Speaker 1: these kids, it's like a drug to them. It's so
Speaker 1: easy to become addicted to an app where every day
Speaker 1: it you know, feeds you the content that you want
Speaker 1: to see, but also allows you to perform on this
Speaker 1: huge stage and become famous. After spending a week with
Speaker 1: with Rosalie and her mom, I felt like Rosalie really
Speaker 1: wants to do this. This is the life that she
Speaker 1: wants to have. Um, it's definitely satisfying to see that
Speaker 1: your creation, you know, whatever your content creating is getting views,
Speaker 1: it's getting likes, it's getting engagement in comments. Because you
Speaker 1: make your original content, people like it, people start doing it.
Speaker 1: You become a trendsetter, or you create trends, you make
Speaker 1: twist to trends, and it feels good like I did that.
Speaker 1: You know, I created something, people enjoyed it, and I
Speaker 1: feel like the likes and the views and all of
Speaker 1: that are just the product, Like you just see the
Speaker 1: outcome like that. And where does that leave TikTok, the
Speaker 1: platform that hosts all these trends. What's the company's stance
Speaker 1: on this whole controversy. We talk about that when we return.
Speaker 1: You know, when you look at the TikTok website and
Speaker 1: you look at its community guidelines, they do have a
Speaker 1: specific tab for minor safety, and they state very clearly
Speaker 1: that you cannot post, upload, stream, or share any content
Speaker 1: that implies or depicts a minor in a sexual way.
Speaker 1: That's including a minor with sexually explicit song lyrics or
Speaker 1: content with sexually explicit dancing of a minor. And it
Speaker 1: even specifies saying this includes twerking, breast shaking, pelvic thrust ng,
Speaker 1: fondling of the briasts. So they're very specific about what
Speaker 1: can stay on and what should come down. In response
Speaker 1: to pressure from lawmakers, in February, TikTok said it would
Speaker 1: place new restrictions on what it calls overtly sexually suggestive content.
Speaker 1: It said users under sixteen would no longer be eligible
Speaker 1: to appear on the apps for you page. That's this
Speaker 1: algorithm curated feed that recommends videos to users. But users
Speaker 1: under sixteen can still appear in the four you feed
Speaker 1: of those who already follow them, and the new rule
Speaker 1: won't affect Jenny Papach's videos. She turned sixteen in November.
Speaker 1: I think the problem is for the individual moderators whose
Speaker 1: job it is to make that decision. At the end
Speaker 1: of the day, they have a judgment call to make
Speaker 1: in just twenty seconds, and they have to look at
Speaker 1: a thousand videos a day, and it is very hard
Speaker 1: to decide if a video is sexually suggestive or not.
Speaker 1: What is the day of a moderator for TikTok look like.
Speaker 1: Content moderators at TikTok are effectively scanning through videos that
Speaker 1: have been uploaded to the platform where the artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: have flagged them as violating one of TikTok's community guidelines.
Speaker 1: So first computers search through these and then they throw
Speaker 1: out flags based on algorithms that compare it to lots
Speaker 1: of different photos and say, this looks like possibly content
Speaker 1: that violates the standards. That's exactly right. So the artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence scans through every single video that's been uploaded to
Speaker 1: the platform. That's twenty billion in the first half of
Speaker 1: this year. The AI is looking for content that violates
Speaker 1: community guidelines. And some of that is obvious, like nudity, violence,
Speaker 1: hate speech, extremist behavior, they'll just take that down immediately.
Speaker 1: The artificial intelligence isn't sure, and it doesn't know if
Speaker 1: if this content is particularly violating guidelines or not. It
Speaker 1: will send it through to a human moderator to decide.
Speaker 1: So they're looking at videos that the artificial intelligence has
Speaker 1: flagged as being potentially problematic, and they're deciding if it
Speaker 1: should stay up or if it should come down. And
Speaker 1: you said they have twenty seconds to do this. Is
Speaker 1: that a standard or is that just what it takes
Speaker 1: they get through the day. They are expected to review
Speaker 1: a thousand videos a day, and they have about twenty
Speaker 1: seconds to look at each video. But some TikTok clips
Speaker 1: are only a couple of seconds long, others are longer,
Speaker 1: so they've got to make very quick judgment calls. And
Speaker 1: to add a further layer of complexity on this already
Speaker 1: very complex issue, TikTok has an if in doubt leave
Speaker 1: it up mantra. What that means is that the moderators
Speaker 1: are effectively told, if you don't know, leave it up,
Speaker 1: rather than taking it down, and that Mantra has allowed
Speaker 1: a lot of Jenny Pope Patches content to stay on
Speaker 1: the platform even when on face vale you it looks
Speaker 1: like it's violating some of those minor safety guidelines. But
Speaker 1: let me ask you about that. Because the safety guidelines
Speaker 1: that you just described seemed very specific. It also sounds
Speaker 1: from your description of her videos that some of the
Speaker 1: things described in those guidelines are in fact in those videos.
Speaker 1: Why would there be a when in doubt situation when
Speaker 1: the things explicitly spelled out in the guidelines are in
Speaker 1: the videos. Yeah, I mean I have a good example
Speaker 1: of this from her account. She recently posted a video
Speaker 1: that was part of a TikTok trend where she's washing
Speaker 1: the new car that she just bought with her TikTok earnings.
Speaker 1: So she's in the car wash, she's in a gray
Speaker 1: skin type body suit and white heeled boots, and she
Speaker 1: is leathering foam on the car with her chiest. She's
Speaker 1: winking at the camera. She's dancing covered in water and
Speaker 1: foam from the car wash. With that particular video, a
Speaker 1: lot of older men have been taking screen shots of
Speaker 1: her bent over the car or her and various poses
Speaker 1: that are sexually suggestive and have been sharing them with
Speaker 1: one another and various group threads on other social media platforms.
Speaker 1: In one particular forum, I was looking through some of
Speaker 1: these photos were being swapped and one person commented saying, guys,
Speaker 1: this is CP the acronym for CPS child porn. So
Speaker 1: that video in and of itself, what she was doing
Speaker 1: was sexually suggestive, but it was part of a TikTok trend,
Speaker 1: So she was doing something that a lot of other
Speaker 1: people had done in order to get it trending. And
Speaker 1: I sent this video to a Trust and Safety team
Speaker 1: worker to ask him, do you think that this should
Speaker 1: have come down? He looked at it and told me no,
Speaker 1: why would we take it down? She's fully clothed. When
Speaker 1: you're a moderator, it comes down to your viewpoint of
Speaker 1: what's sexually suggestive. And what's not So TikTok is really
Speaker 1: stuck in the middle between the creators, some of the
Speaker 1: young creators who are posting sexually suggestive content, and the
Speaker 1: watchdog moms or the vigilante creators who are calling them
Speaker 1: out and calling the platform out for not doing enough
Speaker 1: to protect kids. One of the difficulties that TikTok faces
Speaker 1: is that it's just overwhelmed by content. If we think
Speaker 1: about the first half of this year, TikTok removed more
Speaker 1: than two hundred million videos. More than of those videos
Speaker 1: were taken down because they violated a minor safety guideline.
Speaker 1: That's a huge number of videos, two hundred million. But
Speaker 1: in that same period, twenty billion videos were uploaded to
Speaker 1: the platform. So how do you as a content moderation team,
Speaker 1: as a trust and safety team that is set up
Speaker 1: to try and pretend to uses and take down problematic conteen,
Speaker 1: how do you begin when you have twenty billion videos?
Speaker 1: It is just an impossible task. Thanks so much to
Speaker 1: Olivia Carville for coming back on the podcast. You can
Speaker 1: read Olivia's Bloomberg Business Week stories about TikTok at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com and special thanks to the video team behind
Speaker 1: the audio you heard in this episode Andrea Deski and
Speaker 1: Dmitri salv Chuck and if you want to hear the
Speaker 1: story of TikTok's rise from startup to social media juggernaut
Speaker 1: and how it became the center of US China tensions.
Speaker 1: It's season two of Bloomberg's foundering podcast, The TikTok Story.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Tech.
Speaker 1: It's the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the i
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Speaker 1: story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com.
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Speaker 1: is Vicky Burgalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Rebecca Shasson. Our associate producer is Sam Gobauer.
Speaker 1: Hilda Garcia is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidrin.
Speaker 1: I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big
Speaker 1: Take