Spanish Minister Demands TikTok Suspend Operations Over Child Abuse Material; Watchdog Refuses Blanket Block and Opens Probe
Spain's Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, demanded on November 10 that TikTok suspend its operations in Spain until child sexual abuse material is eliminated from the platform, and appealed to the Public Prosecutor's Office and the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD). 'It is not up to the government to suspend TikTok on its own; if it were up to us, it would have been suspended yesterday,' she said.
The demand followed an investigation published on November 9 by the Spanish fact-checking nonprofit Maldita.es, which monitored the platform for 35 days from September 11 to October 15 and found 1,183 explicit posts containing child sexual abuse material, with at least 48 million views and more than 26,000 profiles commenting on or sharing the material. Of 50 videos the researchers reported as a test, TikTok removed five and restricted another 13 within Spain only. TikTok says it has a zero-tolerance policy and disputed the investigation's handling, saying it had not been given the full scope to identify and remove the material.
On November 11 the AEPD said it had opened a probe but rejected the government's demand for a temporary blanket block of the app. It will request the identified links from Maldita.es and information from TikTok on its removal measures, then take targeted measures against specific links and content. The agency noted that TikTok's lead EU privacy regulator is Ireland's Data Protection Commission and that it would share information with Irish and other EU regulators and the European Commission. The Attorney General has also ordered the cybercrimes prosecutor to investigate potential crimes in the production and dissemination of such material on the platform.
Source: Reuters
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：智能手机上的 TikTok 应用（资料图）。图：Solen Feyissa，CC BY-SA 2.0，经维基共享资源 / The TikTok app on a smartphone (file photo). Photo by Solen Feyissa, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
