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.
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 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.
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
not caused by technical progress but by
poverty and greedcapitalismNo need for liberal euphemisms.
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.
You consider this consensual?
Where can I not consent to capitalism in the world, without having to starve and be homeless?
Most capitalist societies draw the line somewhere before “Gaining capital through the Sexual exploitation of children is ok”
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Which ones? Epsteins clients came from all over the world…
You can just call it capitalism.
Because children are free to be raped, making it a free market activity?
Basically, yes. Everything is commoditized, even the abuse of humans.
Yeah child abuse didn’t exist before capitalism
Child abuse for profit?
Nor did paying for it apparently. And it certainly doesn’t exist in whatever replacement OP wants…
Are you saying that child abuse for profit exists outside of capitalism? Any examples?
Look at any authoritarian regime. Here’s an article about laws by country, and Russia and China rank very poorly. I don’t think we can trust statistics for authoritarian regimes, but those statistics exist if you look.
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.
TikTok was Douyin, which *acquired * musical.ly to get into the US market.
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
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.
