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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Holy fuck, that article was dark.
Uh, jesus christ, also what the fuck.
Computers were a mistake, and the internet just made it worse.
What’s described in this article is a symptom which is not caused by technical progress but by poverty and greed
Poverty and greed on one side, and fucked up people on both. Someone spending $130,000 over 10 years on this shit is insane from two perspectives…how can you consume this content for one, and secondly, how can you afford all that much money for this?
It doesn’t seem like the consumers are messed up by poverty. And I have no idea what’s causing them to be messed up, and therefore, I have no idea how we stop the consumers from wanting to consume.
Because like you said, as long as there’s a market, this is likely to continue due to the greed and poverty aspects on the “seller’s” side…
Exploitation is fundamental to capitalism. It’s just more obvious in this case.
Actually consensual economic interaction, aka free market activity, is fundamental to capitalism.
Most capitalist societies draw the line somewhere before “Gaining capital through the Sexual exploitation of children is ok”
You can just call it capitalism.
Because children are free to be raped, making it a free market activity?
Yeah child abuse didn’t exist before capitalism
Because before computers and the internet there was no child abuse? Child abuse is of all ages. And who is more vulnerable to it? The weak and the poor.
Personally, i believe we’ll see more and more of it, as most of society gets poorer and poorer. People will do anything to survive.
This is just an easy way to earn money. And its easier to reach a bigger audience. But i don’t think its gotten worse because we have the internet. Thats just bullshit in my opinion.
But then, i don’t have any kids, so what do i know about abusing your child for money.
WTF. We could probably stop this if they weren’t wasting endless resources on prohibition, genocide, MIC, etc.
what’s prohibition
