Spanish media outlet uncovers 26,000 TikTok accounts sharing child abuse content

The team at independent NGO foundation Maldita.es have uncovered more than 1,000 explicit videos of child abuse, with 48 million views, in an investigation they published this Monday. This is just a glimpse into the underworld that, surprisingly, lies right at our fingertips.

The data in Maldita's report 'TikTok, a haven for paedophiles' is shocking: more than 26,000 profiles belonging to potential paedophiles exchange or sell child abuse material, 7,700 of them in Spanish; 780 accounts sell abusive material and use TikTok to attract buyers; in 91 live streams detected by Maldita.es, users request actions, sometimes of a sexual nature, and more than 2,000 members in a single community are searching for content featuring babies.

According to the researchers, there are various ways to access child sexual abuse material. They set up a 'clean' account which they fed with this type of content and the algorithm eventually led them to dark corners of the internet from which the platform was even profiting.

They discovered, for example, that under-18s, including 13-year-old girls, are streaming live on TikTok, something the platform bans. Paedophiles would join these live streams featuring girls and ask them to perform in a certain way in exchange for "gifts" (virtual items that viewers buy with real money to support their favourite creators). "I'll give you three roses if you show me your feet," is just one conversation the researchers detected.

"In Spain and other EU countries, we have seen girls being harassed while streaming live from home on a Friday night, but also at school: in the middle of lessons, in the toilets, at break time," the document states.

According to the report, thousands of minors are involved in this form of child exploitation every day. The issue is that TikTok is ultimately pocketing a share of that money.

"How is it possible that a platform which generated 9.1 billion dollars in 2025 in the UK, Europe and Latin America alone does not control this?" ask the journalists at Maldita, who say they uncovered all this information in just 35 days of investigation.

The platform does not appear to be taking the necessary steps to tackle a problem of this magnitude. Maldita's CEO, Clara Jiménez, details a case that illustrates TikTok's lack of interest in preventing child sexual abuse on its platforms.

"Everyone knows that 'pizza', on these platforms, means child pornography because 'pizza' is short for 'cheese pizza', the initials of which spell out 'child pornography'. In these settings, anyone who wants pizza or sells pizza is referring to child pornography. Other platforms such as Meta have already banned this 'pizza'-related content and warn anyone requesting it that they are asking for images of abuse. But TikTok does not do this," Jiménez says.

The same thing happens when someone types 'sexy 8-year-old girl' into the TikTok search bar. "Meta tells you that this content is child pornography, whereas TikTok actually makes it available to you," she points out.

According to Jiménez , TikTok should hire more human moderators to review posts, but it should also ensure compliance with its own internal rules regarding child pornography to prevent the appearance of images as brutal as the rape of a baby: content that the authors of the report have come across.

According to TikTok's terms and conditions, anyone found on any occasion attempting to access abusive content will be banned from the social network, but the Maldita team have found that this is not the case. "There are other platforms that do more and use better filters," Jiménez says.

Maldita will pass on all the material it has compiled to the cybercrime unit of the attorney general's office.

Jiménez warns that "there is a complete lack of awareness about the content that can be found on TikTok".

"It's the social network of dance videos, but also the one that hosts the most child pornography and political extremism," she explains. This lack of awareness, which extends to everything that happens online, also affects parents: "70 per cent of the material seized from pedophiles consists of photos of children that any parent uploads to social media".

Jiménez urges families to be more careful with the photos they share, because TikTok's internal control mechanisms are not working. "Of the more than 1,000 pieces of content we have collected, we have reported 50 through the social network's reporting mechanism, but they have responded that only ten per cent violate their internal rules."

The head of Maldita also highlights the lack of legal oversight of the platform, which allows it to disregard the legal obligations stipulated in the EU's digital services act, which states that networks must act "promptly to remove illegal content or block access to it".

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