Take care of your children!
A mother warns of people who exploit videos for their own purposes
© irissca / Adobe Stock
Some children become young influencers at an early age. A mother is now calling on TikTok to better protect the little ones after she notices something uncomfortable.
Just three years old, Wren is a real star on the social media platform TikTok: 17.4 million people follow the little girl’s account, which simply posts cute videos from her mother. On Instagram, the two also have 223,000 followers with their account. The profiles are public. After all, this step is necessary in order to reach enough people and earn money with the channels. However, several users have now noticed that the content may be misused by pedosexual people for their sexual fantasies. Because supposedly harmless videos of the child are sometimes saved tens of thousands of times in the personal favorites.
Seemingly harmless content
The little girl’s mother regularly posts videos (or photos on Instagram) of her daughter. But according to one user, this should be done with caution: “What mothers noticed is how many videos Wren saves,” says Jessica from the #hashtagfacts account. Some videos of the girl, for example in shorter clothes, are saved more often than others. Up to 45,000 times. Still others, such as a video of Wren biting into a hot dog, have been saved up to 374,500 times.
The search queries also seem to be less harmless than it first appeared, according to the user. Some have already been deleted, but in some cases search queries such as “wren scandalous outfits” – i.e.: Wren in scandalous clothes – appeared more and more. Other first search queries that are suggested to users in connection with the username of the account are, for example, “sausage”, “pickle” or “disturbing video”. So, among other things, the said hot dog video and one in which she eats a cucumber.
Inappropriate comments under the videos
“I’m not going to show the really disgusting comments here,” Jessica said in her video. But there are also supposedly harmless statements that are also problematic on closer inspection. For example, statements like “she is so mature for her age” (in German: “she is so grown up for her age”). She herself filmed her daughter during one of the social media challenges and uploaded the video to her TikTok account. One person then translated “your daughter is kinda cute” with the addition “not gonna lie”, roughly: “I’m not lying”.
“Then I realized that my daughter’s video had been saved way too many times,” she says. “So I removed it.” But that was not the end of it. “I went to her Instagram account and found usernames on her private profile that had no business there,” the mother continued. Her daughter is only 12 years old and these people on the Internet are a serious problem. “The problem with kids saving and following online is that they use the content to do disgusting things, so watch out for your kids.”
risks on the web
The Internet offers many opportunities, but also harbors high risks. It is up to each parent how he/she deals with the possible danger to their own child. While much of the content seems harmless to us at first glance, it can be interpreted very differently by pedosexual people. For example, in videos and photos that show more skin or in which certain foods are eaten. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be difficult to discern the intentions of a follower when subscribing to a social media channel. It is therefore all the more important that adults keep an eye on this problem for their children.