As an expert on business ethics, each day is another dreary ride into greed and evil. Today is Friday and just another day in the exploration of greed when we find that an internet platform leads children to porn. Yes, just another day.
TikTok leads teenagers to porn after a few clicks. The internet being the cesspool that it is, we shouldn’t be too surprised but I am. What surprises me is that this was in “restricted” mode.
That’s right. The fake accounts used in the study were not just teenagers, they were supposed to be operating in restricted mode but still after a few clicks they began leading these example children to adult topics and pornography. A parent doing due diligence could be fooled be this thing and that was probably the intent.
Let me get the news article that leads to my content out of the way as well as the usual quote.
(Internet Porn breaching the home’s defenses.)
The article is called – TikTok ‘directs child accounts to pornographic content within a few clicks’
Global Witness set up fake accounts using a 13-year-old’s birth date and turned on the video app’s “restricted mode”, which limits exposure to “sexually suggestive” content.
Researchers found TikTok suggested sexualised and explicit search terms to seven test accounts that were created on clean phones with no search history.
The terms suggested under the “you may like” feature included “very very rude skimpy outfits” and “very rude babes” – and then escalated to terms such as “hardcore pawn [sic] clips”. For three of the accounts the sexualised searches were suggested immediately.
The article was written by Dan Milmo writing for the online version of the Guardian.
The inevitable question here is why would anyone do this. The money is very good. Teenagers have a lot of spending power and these villains want to tap into it.
How many ways can I say that this terribly wrong and people shouldn’t make money this way? Close to infinity. So moral persuasion is useless. If you want to stop children watching and buying porn, people have to pay fines and go to jail.
There is no other choice. We’ve had the kind words and tried to reason with them and yet here we find a process designed to fool a cautious parent but still get the child as a customer. That speaks to a massive amount of intent. They are playing the government and the people of this nation for fools pretending to regulate content while building a Swiss cheese of holes that any child can get through to get to the supposedly regulated content. It is not right.
Let me in closing state the facts about online regulation when it comes to the United States. We are failing as a regulator of the internet. The EU and Australia have long ago taken the lead in online regulation and we should be following their lead.
James Alan Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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