After confirming the authenticity of the Bigo livestreamer with the authorities, The Times searched the Apple and Google app stores for other video chat apps. Reporters identified a sample of more than 80 apps that advertised children before stopping the search. They later contacted Homeland Security Investigations, the government’s main law enforcement group for international exploitation, for comment.
“The number one customer base paying for this abuse is in the United States,” the agent said. “It’s not like they are abused once a day. It’s 50 men getting 50 separate shows. They’ll wake up these kids in the middle of the night to be abused.”
Asked about The Times’s sample of offending apps, Mr. Sainz said a majority had been detected during the company’s standard review process, with an additional 20 taken down after an internal investigation in response to The Times’s findings.
A Florida man, Christopher John Streeter, has been serving life in prison since 2021 after sending roughly $130,000 over a decade to people in the Philippines to direct the rape of children as young as 12.
He paid a premium if the video depicted girls losing their virginity or suffering injuries because of the sexual violence. Court records show Mr. Streeter’s victims were particularly vulnerable “due to poverty and illness.”
Holy shit that’s dark.
Why are people like this?
The phrase “hurt people hurt people” immediately comes to mind, but I still have no idea what Streeter’s story was, even after reading way more than I would have liked to. But I think yours is an important question for people to be asking, if they ever hope to prevent abuse (as much as could ever be prevented, I guess).
I wish I’d asked for a tl;Dr instead of reading the article.
Tl;Dr: mostly Americans paying people in impoverished countries to abuse and rape their presumed children. From racy photos of small kids to extra money for evident injuries. That’s about as far as I got.
This is dark and fucked up… But it’s on a spectrum of imperial exploitation. There are kids who live in mines for our cell phones. Exploitation is the heart of capitalism.
Holy fuck, that article was dark.
Apple is busy fighting DMA in EU and Google is busy fighting the monopoly case in US. What are they supposed to do, fight human rights abuses instead of protecting profits of shareholders?!
A few years ago I conducted an internal months long investigation into Bigo Live and about a dozen remarkably similar apps. They were cookie cutter template apps with slight tweaks to test market trends and engagement, all produced by one single corporate entity: ByteDance. While sharing my findings with the team did result in new child endangerment policies being enacted internally, it is absolutely disgusting to see these apps are still at large, getting worse, and the massive tech company I worked for did essentially nothing to help externally.
EDIT: I should note the content I encountered was not abuse, but very apparent and out in the open grooming, in apps where a user’s location would often be shown publicly
How is Bigo linked to ByteDance?
Fair question I should clarify: ByteDance was using a number of LLCs at the time to (my understanding) find the best / most addictive TikTok-style app. I believe TikTok was around at the time but it was called something different. Looking into this briefly again, it seems Bigo isn’t directly connected to ByteDance, but the exact style/format of app is apparently being abused by multiple companies across countries now.
So was anything in your original comment actually true?
Sure, everything except the direct connection between Bigo specifically and ByteDance. Like I said originally, there were numerous apps that I found platforming this behavior, and TikTok’s parent company was responsible for most of them. This was several years ago (~5) and I’m going off memory here, so I do apologize for the inconsistency
TikTok used to be Musical.ly and it was far more niche than what TikTok is today. It was populated primarily by tweens and it was for making musical lip-sync videos.
TikTok was Douyin, which *acquired * musical.ly to get into the US market.
WTF. We could probably stop this if they weren’t wasting endless resources on prohibition, genocide, MIC, etc.
what’s prohibition
I’m guessing they’re talking about the War on Drugs.
