Alberto Núñez Feijóo has called for the protection of minors after cases of child sexual abuse detected on TikTok, and has turned that denunciation into a direct political warning: what is a crime on the street will also be a crime in the digital world.
The leader of the PP and candidate for the presidency of the Government said on X that he had learned “first-hand” about Maldita.es’ investigation into the harassment of minors on TikTok live streams. “It’s chilling and we cannot look the other way,” he wrote, in a message focused on pressure on the platform and the protection of families.
Feijóo also maintained that this will be one of his “main commitments” to families, but his message does not by itself resolve the legal scope of the problem. The political denunciation, for now, points to a conflict already transferred to the institutional channel.
The Government makes a move and transfers the case to the Prosecutor's Office
The Ministry of Youth and Childhood, for its part, sent a letter to the Attorney General's Office to act on the information published by Maldita.es about alleged cases of child sexual abuse on TikTok. Sources from the department indicated this Monday that, in addition, the possibility of paralyzing the platform's services in Spain has been raised.
In that letter, the department transfers the known information to the Prosecutor's Office so that, in the exercise of its powers, it adopts the necessary measures to guarantee the comprehensive protection of children and adolescents who may be affected. The decision now rests with the Public Prosecutor's Office, although the political approach has already increased pressure on the social network.
One thousand videos detected and an incomplete response from TikTok
Maldita.es published an investigation this Monday in which it claims to have identified more than a thousand TikTok videos with explicit child sexual abuse material. Of these, it reported a sample of 50 to the platform as illegal content, with a cumulative reach of 8.8 million views and more than 148,000 “likes”.
According to the organization, TikTok has deleted five of these videos, 10%, and has blocked another 13, 26%, only in Spain. In 6% of cases, it did not respond and, in the remaining 58%, it considered that they did not violate either the law or its rules, although more than half of the latter were removed within 72 hours of the complaints.
After that period, 38% of the reported accounts remained active. The investigation thus leaves open the central question: what measures will the Prosecutor's Office adopt and how far will the administrative response go against a platform that, for now, has removed part of the content, but not all.
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