TikTok moderators say they were shown child sexual abuse videos during training

According to a Forbes article published on Thursday, content moderators recruited to review videos for TikTok said that as part of their training materials, they were exposed to sexually explicit footage of children.The investigation used moderators who were employed by Teleperformance, a third-party business that the platform hires to control material on its site.An ex-employee named Nasser, who was part of a team that assisted TikTok’s artificial intelligence in identifying content that wasn’t permitted on the platform, told Forbes he worked on the team.

Nasser claimed that during their training at the organisation, he and his coworkers were exposed to sexually graphic pictures and films of youngsters.With TikTok’s recent surge in popularity, a large portion of its content moderation has been contracted out to outside businesses. These businesses employ people to manually evaluate videos for potential violations of the platforms’ regulations on graphic content. Like Facebook before it, several of these content moderators have claimed to have undergone severe emotional stress and claim that TikTok did not provide them with the tools necessary for the job.Whitney Turner, a different former Teleperformance employee, told Forbes that she worked there for more than a year before leaving in 2021.

According to the article, Turner claimed to have access to a spreadsheet known as the “Daily Required Reading,” or the “DRR,” which was available to hundreds of Teleperformance and TikTok staff members. She revealed to the media that this spreadsheet contained illustrations of TikTok-prohibited content and contained pictures of tortured and naked youngsters.”This is someone’s son, I was thinking as I moderated. Someone’s daughter is this. These parents are unaware that we have kept this photo, this film, this trauma, and this crime “Turner said to Forbes. “I’m fairly certain that parents would set TikTok ablaze if they knew that.”According to the report, Turner claimed that she gave the FBI the document and met with a representative in June.