How TikTok makes money from sexual livestreams in Kenya
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TikTok is huge in Kenya. Half the population uses it to post dances and trends and go live. These live streams are also a way to make money. Viewers send virtual gifts that can be cashed out. And most of the lives show people trying to sell you stuff, gaming or doing makeup routines. But late at night in Kenya, a different kind of content takes over.

Girls as young as 15 dance provocatively. They use code words for sex or other suggestive behaviour to ask for gifts. And there's a catch. TikTok's making money off this too. So today, you're going to hear how young women and girls are earning money from sexual content on TikTok and why it's going under the radar. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and this is What In The World from the BBC World Service. MUSIC

Dabula Kamoli is a BBC reporter who has been to Kenya investigating this for a BBC Africa Eye documentary and she joins me in the studio now. Hi Dabula. Hi, thank you for having me Hannah. It's great to have you on. So let's start off with the kind of videos that you have seen, the kind of live streams that you have seen.

So I spent a lot of time on TikTok and this would be hours and hours and hours on TikTok. And of course, when you're there during the day, it's just like any other TikTok live stream that you'd see from the US or wherever in the world. It's just loads of people doing TikTok dance challenges. But the longer I spent on TikTok, especially towards midnight Kenya time, 1am, 2am, then you notice the content changes and it becomes more risky. And it's just

lot of young women sitting around, some of them dancing provocatively, but some of them are sitting and they're soliciting or selling sexual content on their live streams. And for a casual user, it's difficult to pick this up because sometimes they're using Swahili or slang. But then if you are on those live streams at night, you do notice that sometimes it's live stream after live stream. And you start to kind of understand what's going on when you spend a lot of time on those TikTok live streams.

TikTok has strict rules about nudity and sexual content and under 18s children are banned from going on live streams. How do these live streams, the ones that you've described, how do they get around TikTok's policies?

So I think it's two things. There's the language. Perhaps maybe the language is not being picked up by TikTok moderation. But also some of these young women, I remember in some of the live streams, were trying to dance away from the camera. And I don't know if this is because they've realized that perhaps TikTok will pick up on this. In terms of it filtering through, obviously TikTok have got...

a way of flagging and removing the content. They have their own ways of working, which includes moderation. In terms of whistleblowers, we talked to one moderator who said that when they're doing the moderating of the live streams from Kenya, that 80% of the content that's flagged to him is this inappropriate sexual content. So it sounds like it's a lot, or at least for him when he's on shift,

a lot of that content comes through for moderation. So there's the question of, OK, are there enough people moderating this content? And why is there so much content of this, particularly in Kenya? It's a real hotspot. Kenya is one of the largest users of

TikTok, i.e. in terms of numbers. So for instance, absolute numbers, yes, Indonesia and US markets are the largest. But according to Arota's report from 2023, nearly half or around half of the Kenyans use the platform. That means it's massive. You know, if half of the population is on TikTok and especially young people, then it's

That's one way of, you know, why it's become so big because a lot of people are using it. You spoke to some of the women and young girls who are doing this. How young are we talking? And tell me a bit about their lives and their lifestyles. Okay. So when I went to meet the young girls, some of them told me they started when they were 15, 18.

And I also spoke to a charity where they said some of them are even younger when they start. And the key thing is that these girls are coming from homes where they're struggling to make ends meet. So for a lot of the girls I spoke to, they come from deprived neighborhoods. They come from very poor homes. And so...

The potential of being able to earn money on TikTok through gifting is lowering because most of them have not finished high school. So the idea of gaining formal employment for them is not that, you know, they end up either working as domestic workers in people's homes, cleaning clothes or cleaning their homes and they earn around 100 or 200 Kenya shillings, which is around one pound, two dollars a day.

So if somebody says to them, you can dance on TikTok and get 10,000 Kenya shillings, which is around 100 pounds, they jump onto that. I think TikTok is an easier way for them to earn money in that regard. Money, as you say, is encouraging this behaviour. So let's hear a clip from your documentary now. It features a young woman who started participating in these live streams when she was a teenager.

Without her mum's knowledge, Sophie, not her real name, used her phone to join TikTok,

She was 15 at the time. I was going through a rough phase as a child. Most of my friends were a bad influence on me and so I did things that I regret now. I took photos of myself and posted them. I found people who were engaging with my content and I became addicted. I got to a point where people would be messaging me asking me to send videos. Some would tell me to dance in different styles while others promised to pay for videos of me dancing.

There was a man from Germany who was prolific in my account. He used to suggest clothes that I should wear and how to make my videos more appealing. For example, wearing swimming costumes. He used to video call me demanding that I caress my breasts and private parts. Sophie says she was earning up to 40 US dollars a day.

But then a sex video she sent was uploaded to another social media platform without her consent. And her neighbors found out. They call me a lost sheep and young people are told that I'll lead them astray. I'm lonely most of the time. I feel haunted.

Dabula, it sounds like Sophie didn't fully understand the potential consequences of sharing this sexual content on TikTok. The worrying thing is that they don't realise what world they're getting into because when they are asked to dance by these digital pimps, it seems innocent at first.

But then slowly by slowly, it starts to get darker and they're asked to share more explicit content. And often the more explicit content is then shared on another platform. But actually, to be honest, some of them had actually been involved in prostitution, i.e. were on the streets. And so they said to me, for instance, being on TikTok was a way of them to get away from the streets. So there are some who...

are recruited by the digital pimps on TikTok, have had no idea of that life or have never been on the streets before.

But there are some women, especially the older ones that I talked to, they said for them, they would go into this digital world because for them, then they're able to earn money making sexual content via TikTok without having to be on the streets. Tell me more about these digital pimps. From the sound of it, these women are not acting alone. So the women I spoke to and the girls I spoke to, they often go on TikTok because everybody's on TikTok and they're doing these dance challenges on TikTok.

But then there are people who are hanging out on TikTok, the predators who are looking out for girls who they can use and manipulate to make them earn money. A lot of these girls were saying to me when they went on TikTok and they wanted to do lives because through the live streaming is when you can earn the gifts. You can earn money through the gifting service on TikTok.

So they needed somebody with clout or a platform where they can be exposed and then, you know, be able to earn money. So they end up getting hosted by somebody who's got a large following who can say, hey, look, this is so-and-so, please gift them. And, you know, the pimp or this host has promised them a cut for whatever they're doing on those live streams. Let's pause now and hear a clip of that from the documentary. No.

He's telling the women when to stop and start dancing. And he's hyping up the audience, asking them to send gifts. Elevate the dancers, he says. It sounds like quite a complex scheme. So you've got the women and girls who are dancing and making this content, the digital pimps who make a cut, and then you've got the women and girls who are dancing and making this content,

The money comes in from the TikTok users sending these gifts and emojis. But it's not just the women and the pimps who are making money from this because TikTok also takes a huge cut. And there was an investigation that I worked on in 2022 that found that TikTok takes 70% of the profits from live streams, although it says that it takes much less.

Did you find that TikTok is still taking that much money? Two years later, 2024, I started looking into this live streaming in Kenya and what's happening and how much TikTok is taking. I did a few tests where I sent or I gifted some of my colleagues to find out how much TikTok was taking. When these content creators are on the platform, they have no idea what somebody on the other end is sending unless you actually sit with somebody and do it in real time.

And what I found is sadly the same. The person now sending the money to only received 30%. You've mentioned already that TikTok has content moderators. There are about 40,000 people moderating the videos on the platform and you spoke to some of them. What did they tell you about content moderation on TikTok? Okay. So particularly for the Kenya case, TikTok have hired a company called Teleperformance who do the moderation.

So teleperformance, higher moderators who look at the content from the region and flag up anything that is inappropriate or is in breach of any of the TikTok guidelines and regulations.

which then TikTok has the responsibility to take down or remove. So their work is just to flag up the content. When I spoke to these moderators, they say to me, and one particular whistleblower said to me, that they can only flag that this is inappropriate. And beyond that, he doesn't know what happens once they've flagged it. And when I asked him then, why is that material or why is that content still getting to the public?

And he said the hours are not 24 hours per day. It's not two for seven that they're doing moderation. And if this content is being shared or the live streams are taking place at night, then there's no one or there's not enough people to look at the live streams at night. So that was one thing. The other thing the whistleblower said is it's just not enough of them to look at all the content or all the live stream.

As you say, you spoke to TikTok, you put these allegations to the platform, said that this content was being flagged and not necessarily taken down, that there were women and young girls, sexual content in breach of its guidelines, a huge amount of the money going missing every time someone sends a gift. What did TikTok have to say? So TikTok, in their response to the allegations we put to them, said that TikTok has zero tolerance for exploitation. And they

than for strict safety policies, including robust live content rules, moderation in 70 languages, including Swahili. So for them, it shouldn't be happening. And I think for this documentary, what it's highlighting, even though the TikToks have got guidelines and regulations,

This content is still getting out and that's what we're trying to get to. Why is it still being able to get onto the platform and young children also are on that platform being exploited and making this content? It does concern, you know, children, people who are underage and being involved in sexual exploitation. How do you deal with that?

Has the Kenyan government or the authorities said anything about it? In 2023, there was a petitioner who petitioned the parliament to get TikTok banned. And after that, there have been conversations, debates in parliament on TikTok use and the inappropriate sexual content at night. So...

Eventually, for the Kenyan government, it came to a decision of not completely banning the app. So instead of a total ban, they prefer regulation and moderation. And we did request comment from the Kenyan government, which we haven't received a specific comment. But we do note that officials did meet TikTok.

And through the Kenya Film Commission, they facilitated a meeting and conversations with the TikTok regional office in Africa to talk about the content moderation and regulation. Dabula, thank you so much for coming into the studio. Thank you, Hannah.

You can watch the full documentary on YouTube. It's called Light Lured, live streamed, The Dark World of Digital Brothels. And while you're there, make sure you subscribe to our playlist. It's called What in the World in the Studio. And you can see some of our episodes there in person. We have covered all kinds of things from what's the evidence for banning smartphones in schools to why people are getting more allergic to stuff. That

That is all on the BBC World Service YouTube channel. And that is it for today. Thank you for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and this is What's in the World from the BBC World Service. We'll be back with another episode soon. See you then. With the Blue Cash Everyday Card, it's easy to earn 3% cash back on groceries at U.S. supermarkets, U.S. online retail purchases, and U.S. gas stations. That's how we grow our family's little nest egg. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash explore-bc. Terms and cash back cap apply.