By Mallory Mattingly
TikTok keeps enabling the exploitation of children on the platform, and a recent livestream proves just how insidious it is.
The livestream saw three Afghani children sitting cross-legged with their hands cupped in front of them.
“Please support me. We are very poor,” one of the children said while staring at the camera, according to The Guardian.
These children were on the livestream videos for hours, begging for virtual “gifts” from people around the world.
As the children received a donation, they clapped. After a donation of one cent from a US viewer, a little girl jumped up and shouted, “Thank you, we love you!”
TikTok has since banned the practice of child begging, as it is exploitative, but an investigation found that this practice has not stopped and instead has spread. In fact, TikTok profits from the content, taking 70% of the fees and commission.
UN special reporter Olivier de Schutter said that the platform is “profiting from people’s misery.”
“Taking a cut of people’s suffering is nothing short of digital predation. I urge TikTok to take immediate action and enforce its own policies on exploitative begging and seriously question the ‘commission’ it is taking from the world’s most vulnerable people,” he added.
A digital harm expert from Save the Children, Jeffrey DeMarco, also told The Guardian, “The documented practices represent significant abuses and immediate action must be taken to ensure platforms no longer allow, or benefit directly or indirectly, from content such as this.”
The BBC has been following “more than 300 accounts going live on TikTok trying to work out where that money is going,” which they reported on in a YouTube video.
Related: Deadly TikTok Trends Spark Lawsuits, Possible Bans
Oddly, people who are begging for money across the world in the Middle East now have access to smartphones, the internet and TikTok accounts.
“TikTok is creating and enabling an ecosystem that runs on the exploitation of people’s suffering and why so many of the donors come from the UK,” the BBC said in the video.
Since the investigation began, TikTok started to remove any videos that were flagged as child begging.
“Any live content which features children begging for gifts is not allowed on TikTok,” a spokesperson from TikTok told The Guardian.
The spokesperson claimed that any time there was a video that “had evidence of exploitative begging or child exploitation, there was action taken and the video removed.”
Through the removal of those videos and through “proactive detection by dedicated teams and technology,” TikTok was able to stop over 4 million live streams “to keep our platform safe.”
TikTok may have taken the necessary actions to remove those videos, but this is just another reason why parents need to protect their kids from social media companies’ predatory behavior.
Read Next: Here’s How Migrant Smugglers Use TikTok to Get People Into the United States
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