The State Attorney General's Office has tasked the Cybercrime Prosecutor, Elvira Tejada de la Fuente, with investigating the possible production and dissemination of child sexual abuse material on TikTok. The Attorney General, Teresa Peramato, signed the decree this Wednesday, placing Tejada in charge of the investigations following the complaint by Maldita.es, which has documented over a thousand publications with 48 million accumulated views.
The leaders of the journalistic investigation appeared before Tejada this Wednesday to ratify the complaint and hand over the evidence. The Prosecutor's Office announced that it will examine them immediately to determine if there are indications of crimes related to the creation and dissemination of this material and with the corruption of minors. The complaint also points to possible content sales, recommendations for publications of the same nature, and live broadcasts in which, according to the foundation, money was offered to minors in exchange for performing certain actions.
The Ministry of Youth and Childhood had already requested the intervention of the Prosecutor's Office on Monday. That same day, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, left open the possibility of suspending the service in an interview on La Séptima. "If we have to suspend a social network, we will do it because the rights of minors come first," he stated. The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has also met with Maldita.es to learn the results of the investigation.
TikTok only deleted five of the 50 videos that Maldita.es reported in its test
In 35 days of investigation, the foundation has identified 1,183 explicit videos and images published by more than 200 profiles. Some had been on the platform for up to four months. The team has also documented that the recommendation system showed more related publications, a finding that highlights how this material is amplified once someone uploads it.
To check what happened when a user notified TikTok, Maldita.es reported 50 videos through the platform's own channels. According to their monitoring, TikTok deleted five, blocked another 13 only in Spain, and left three complaints unanswered. In the other 29 cases, it initially communicated that the content did not violate the law or its rules, although more than half of those videos disappeared within the following 72 hours. After that period, 38% of the reported accounts remained accessible.
TikTok maintains that it prohibits such content and states that the lack of access to all findings makes it difficult to locate and remove them. Maldita.es responds that it had already alerted the company through its official channels and that it has handed over the evidence to the Prosecutor's Office to prevent this material or the links that allow access to it from circulating via email. The foundation adds that it had already shared its database with TikTok in a previous investigation.
Since the report was published, TikTok has extended search restrictions, which it first applied in Spain, to other countries, as Maldita.es confirmed this Wednesday. The team had already located a hundred new publications on Tuesday, after the platform began to remove some of the flagged material.
Data Protection prepares specific blockades and takes the case to Ireland and Brussels
The Minister of Youth and Children, Sira Rego, has asked the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) to provisionally suspend TikTok's activity in Spain through an urgent procedure. After meeting with the company on Tuesday, she also demanded that it remove the material, certify what it had deleted, and collaborate with the Prosecutor's Office. According to Rego, the platform's representatives expressed willingness to continue discussions, without specifying measures at the meeting.
The AEPD announced this Wednesday that it has asked Maldita.es for the reported links and TikTok for information on what it has done to remove them. Once this documentation has been examined, it will order the blocking of access to specific content where it identifies an illicit processing of minors' data. The Agency is currently pursuing this path, while the Ministry's request for a general suspension has not resulted in a closure order. The urgent procedure invoked by Rego allows for exceptional measures to be adopted in Spain for a maximum of three months.
The supervision of TikTok regarding data protection falls under the responsibility of the Irish Data Protection Commission, where the company has its main establishment in the European Union. The AEPD has announced that it will send the information to them and will also forward it to the European Commission, which oversees compliance with the Digital Services Act by large platforms. In Spain, the Prosecutor's Office can request precautionary measures to protect affected minors.
Brussels already informed TikTok in July, in a separate procedure, of its preliminary conclusion that the platform did not offer sufficient security guarantees for minors' accounts. The Commission then pointed out that posts by teenagers with public accounts could be exposed to any internet user and that the recommendation system could show content from 16 and 17-year-old users to people they had not accepted.
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