American TikTok moderators from the company Teleperformance are shown child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, as part of their training. That writes business magazine Forbes based on information from former TikTok moderators.
The moderators that Forbes has spoken, worked for the American branch of Teleperformance, a French multinational that moderates posts for social media platforms, among other things. In order to recognize and tag CSAM as such, employees were shown footage of children being abused during training. In addition, they were given spreadsheets showing hundreds of samples of CSAM and other content banned by TikTok. The moderators had to go through these spreadsheets daily as a frame of reference, say the ex-employees.
“I have a daughter and I don’t think it’s right for a group of strangers to watch this material,” a former moderator told Forbes, who left Teleperformance in 2020. “I don’t think they should use something like that for training.”
Whitney Turner, also a former Teleperformance moderator, was so shocked by the material that she contacted the FBI. She says she spoke with an FBI agent in June, although the Federal Security Service would not confirm this to Forbes. “I was moderating and I thought, This is someone’s son. This is someone’s daughter. These parents don’t know we have this stuff stored. I’m sure the parents would want to destroy TikTok if they knew,” said Turner.
Distribution and storage of CSAM is prohibited in the United States. Companies are required to report the content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). The material should then be kept for 90 days, but the number of people who see the content should be kept to a minimum.
TikTok told Forbes that its own training materials for moderators do not include CSAM, but says that “the platform works with third parties that provide their own training.” Teleperformance denies showing child abuse images in its training sessions and spreadsheets.