TikTok: two hashtags that children use to access pornographic content

Today's children are born with a tablet in one hand and a smartphone in the other. And although each family has its own set of rules regarding internet use, most end up accessing the network from an early age. The problem is that adult content is leaking on social media and has now been identified on TikTok.

Although it is an uncomfortable topic for families and many believe that their children do not consume pornography, the latest data from the Drug Addiction Relief Foundation (FAD) shows that children are starting to watch this type of content between the ages of 8 and 12 years of age and consumption is constant between 13 and 17 years of age.

In addition, according to the report 'Sexual (Dis) Information: Pornography and Adolescents' published by Save the Children, almost 10% of minors have access to pornography before the age of 10 and 53.8% before the age of 13.

In many cases, the main reason that drives them to seek and consume this type of content is the lack of information and sex education on the part of their parents, which has made pornography their only resource for learning about sexuality for 3 out of 10 children, says Save The Children. But on other occasions consumption or access occurs randomly through social networks such as TikTok.

TikTok is the social network most used by minors. In fact, according to Qustodio's latest Annual Data Report, children spend an average of 75 minutes a day on the app. Parents have been more or less calm about their children's use of this platform, but now pornography has infiltrated, though not quite.

On social networks, various hashtags are created, used and distributed in order to promote content, promote initiatives, create trends or increase the number of followers, but they are not always harmless.

And now a new trend has been born on TikTok that, through the use of language codes, allows anyone, regardless of age, to access, share and disseminate pornographic content.

The hashtags used are #youtubenaranja and #youtubeazul and, although at first glance they don't seem to indicate an alarm signal, behind each of them are two large pages of pornographic content:

- #youtubenaranja has a total of 121.3 million views within the platform and refers to Pornhub, one of the largest porn sites out there.

- #youtubeazul has 118 million views and alludes to XXNX videos, another platform for sexual content.

This does not mean that TikTok has pornographic content, but that many people use this platform to reach a wider audience or to promote themselves using these hashtags.

The problem is that this is very difficult to moderate within the application, since these tags are created to bypass control algorithms and can be modified over time to continue distributing this type of content without suspecting that a tag will wake up.

What to do to prevent children from entering pornographic content through TikTok

Experts agree on the same strategy: early sex education. This prevents minors from being associated with sexuality for the first time through pornographic content. If a child knows what pornography is and what labels are about, they will have no interest in accessing them and seeing them for themselves.

Children are not born asexual and, therefore, their sex education “must begin in early childhood and continue through adolescence and adulthood,” says the World Health Organization.

“Sex education is also part of a more general education and, therefore, affects the development of the personality of girls and boys. Its preventive nature not only contributes to the prevention of negative consequences related to sexuality, it can also improve quality of life, health and well-being. In this way, sex education favors the promotion of health in general”, points out the agency.

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