Wee hours when TikTok content becomes ‘sexually explicit’ in Kenya
A section of Kenyans have expressed concern over how the nature of content posted on TikTok in Kenya changes between 2am and 3am. This concern has become a major point of discussion with media personality Ciku Muiruri calling on parents to be vigilant with how their children interact with social media platforms, especially TikTok.
“Parents, Tiktok has taken a dark turn and is not the harmless place it once was. People are posting devil worship videos, mothers are asking for pay to get their underage daughters to do questionable sexually explicit dance moves and apparently at around 2-3 am, its a porn site. And I’m not talking about foreigners, these are Kenyans. God have mercy on us all,” Ciku said.
While these may have been her personal observations, it was the barrage of responses from Kenyans that revealed the nature TikTok takes in the wee hours of the morning as sampled in the reactions below:
“I couldn’t agree more, but wait! What morals are abiding by? We gave wamlambez views on YouTube, we crown dirt lyrics, akina naweza toa bra ma mkono moja (those of ‘I can remove my bra with one hand’),” said Leader Dealer Zilla.
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“It’s high time we address what happens kwa (on) live huko TikTok at these hours,” said Juddy Muchoya.
“Instagram too… ikifika saa tano ni (when it reaches 11pm it becomes a) porn site… women pegging n dildoing or whatever they call it,” said Tabitha Kamene.
“Africans will be the one to face the serious consequences on TikTok soon, ask yourself why China TikTok is different from the rest of the world, some countries have even banned it, anyway I will never join that app,” TM Shamir commented.
“Platforms are always non-discriminate, it is us humans who are evil. Its not TikTok, it’s the online social space versus the freedom of expression, tricky balance,” Peter Mungai opined.
“Just the other day I was on TikTok around midnight only to come across some live going on about devil worshiper…I was very scared to see that…May God protect our kids,” said Juddy Keith.
“I joined it amidst my spirit rejecting it. Eventually, I had to leave, the content served there is. It is the mother of all sorts of evil going around the globe,” commented Betty Njeri.
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In a recent Nation.Africa report, it was found that certain TikTok hashtags were being used to increase the visibility of nude, provocative and sexually suggestive content. One of the hashtags is #usherati used beneath videos of adult nature including live sessions where users dance in suggestive manners, dress provocatively if not being strategically nude and simulate sex.
These users also post their mobile phone numbers where their viewers can send them tips, talk to them one on one or where they could receive requests on certain things they can do.
TikTok has since come out to absolve themselves from blame following complaints on explicit content on their platform.
“We want everyone to feel safe and comfortable when they spend time on TikTok… Over the last year, we’ve been iterating on our machine learning models to improve their consistency and accuracy in detecting sexually explicit, suggestive, or borderline content. Our aim is to quickly identify and remove violative content from our platform and prevent borderline or suggestive content from being recommended to or searchable by teen accounts,” TikTok said.
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