Teen TikTok is More Complicated Than You Think

and it tries to find and delete them. As Olivia dug deeper into TikTok's culture, she discovered another vast corner of the app where young video creators pushed the boundary in a different way, and where the decisions the company makes about what videos to take down and which one is to leave up aren't is clear cut. I asked Olivia to come back on the show to talk about what she calls teen TikTok. Well, teen TikTok is a complicated,

sometimes scary, very strange world. You can go into rabbit holes using TikTok looking at all the content that pops up, and some of it is really cool. And uplifting and fun. Hence some of it is just downright frightening. For the story, I was focused on the hyper sexualization of minors, and I was looking at how TikTok as a platform moderates content from mainly young girls hosting very sexually suggestive videos. In her second story about TikTok for Bloomberg Business Week,

Olivia writes about a hugely popular teen TikTok star. She's a sixteen year old girl who lives in Florida. Her name is Rosalie Eritola on TikTok, though she goes by a different name, Jenny Papach. That's how are millions of followers know her. You'll hear us use both these names throughout this episode. Hi, my name is Rosie Utola. Many people may know me as Jenny Papa as well, and I am a content creator on TikTok and Instagram. She's pretty sessy, she's you know, some of her content is

quite funny. She likes to poke fun at people. She's quite bold, quite brazen for a young teenage girl. She pushes back when people criticize her for wearing certain clothes or dancing in a certain way. Or posting content with sexually explicit lyrics, and she's actually come one of the most controversial teen stars on the platform. If someone goes on her account, what sort of videos are they likely

to see there? If you were to open the Jenny pop pett account right now, you would see a sixteen year old girl who is posting videos of her daily life. And many of her clips she's dancing or lip sinking or joking, or she's acting the full or dressing up

or playing with her brothers and her parents. But if you start scrolling through her content and really looking at the captions, looking at what she's saying, looking at some of the sexual innu window that she's inserting into those captions, or listening to the lyrics of the songs that she's lip sinking too, or looking at some of the clothing choices that she's wearing, or the style of dance that

she's doing. What Jenny Pope Petch has really been doing is leaning in to this kind of bad girl persona or trying to post content that contains shock value, And from her perspective, shock value is doing what you can to get the audience talking, to get them to pause and rewatch and comment on your video because Rosaliera Toland knows that's going to get her more popularity on TikTok. That's what the algorithm wants. Content that is controversial, shocking

that people are going to want to talk about. And that's exactly what she's been posting for the last few years. For pretty much her whole life, she's wanted to become social media famous. She was quite a good belly dancer when she was quite a young child, and she would perform on Musically in Musically was bought by Bite Dance, which is the owner of TikTok, and suddenly those young video makers and musically at a far bigger stage, you know. But I didn't have any intention of like getting bigger

or anything. It kind of just started to happen when I do ddit. This girl Leah Leah Louie, she was a contact creator on Musically belly Dancer, and then I became this like persona of mini Leah Louis, so I was like the mini version of her, and that was like really pushed out and then that began to be like my niche and what everybody was watching me for.

And then I have my own set of videos where I was really dancing and I kind of just started really out, like twelve, and when you got up to three million views, how old were you at the time, I was twelve. When you look at the Genie Pope pech profile on TikTok today, she's got almost seven million followers, which is a huge number for a sixteen year old girl. Do we know who's watching these videos? Are the other teens?

Are the adults? I think about of Jennie Pope as followers male, And when you look in the adult and rage of her followers more than fifty men, So she has hundreds of thousands of adult men watching her content

on a daily basis. I really try not to read those comments from the Alderman, but when I do see them, I kind of just like uncomfortable, and I'll give the phone to my mom and she'll just delete it, or I'll delete it and I'll just move past and forget about it, because I'm just like, I don't want to have that energy in my life. Give us a PG. Thirteen version of some of the comments you get that

would make you feel uncomfortable. You were with me right now, I would do this and that to you, okay, right around now, you might be asking yourself, what do Rosalie's parents think about all this? Olivia told me she went to Florida to meet Rosalie and her family. When it comes to Rosalie Eritoler, not only is her mother watching, her mother's actually encouraging her. How did this account become, you know, so famous and also so contraver herschel at

the same time. And that controversy, a lot of it stems from the relationship that she has with her mother, which is included in a lot of her TikTok post Sometimes her mom is dancing just as suggestively alongside Rosalie

in the Jennie Pope patch account. And I think that her mom is really instrumental in the Jenny Pope Patch account and has helped build it to you know, reaching seven million followers, helping her choose her outfits, driving her to swanky locations to film in like the Ritz Carlton, allowing her to drop out of school and be homeschooled so she can focus on her TikTok career. My name is Mario. Last year, I am forty two years old. Um,

I feel like I'm twenty two. I have six kids, and I'm the mother of Jenni per Patch, my amazing daughter, you know. I I said to her, does it bother you that your daughter, at the age of ten had five hundred thousand followers online who were watching her do belly dancing videos. And she said, no, it didn't bother me at all, she said, she reveled in it. In the back of my mind for many many years, I was like, I'm going to be famous. But it kind of was like my my ship had had sailed in

that sense, you know. And so I believe in destiny, and I believe in manifestation, and I believe that Rosalie is that just how does this type of fame happen? By the age of thirteen, Rosalie and her mother really wanted to help her become a bona fide influencer. They wanted her to become social media famous, and the best way to do that, they thought, was to fly out to l a and try and come up with a

similar concept to the hype house. For those who are listening who may not understand what the hype houses, which I assume as a lot of people out there, This was a mansion in California, where the most popular TikTok stars in the world would well in America at least, would live in together to film content and help one another's accounts grow. So there was a bunch of teenagers just filming TikTok's in this mansion in California, and Rosalie and her mom flew out and decided that they wanted

to make a hype house for minors. She was only thirteen at the time, so they wanted to create a similar concept with a bunch of twelve thirteen year olds who had big TikTok following and all lived together in a home and build content. What they did is they actually sneaked into the original hype House and filmed videos from the bathrooms and balconies, the places that her own idols had really immortalized on TikTok, and those videos viral.

This resulted in the Jenny Poet account really blowing up, and unfortunately for the wrong reasons. At that time, people criticized her for breaking into the hype House, for stalking the hype House creators, for stealing their clothes. One of these creators, who had millions of followers, said that she flushed his fish down the toilet. She denied all of this and said that a caretaker had led her into

the property. But that controversy really propelled her account to reach more than a million followers for the first time, and that taught her to lean into this bad girl persona to post content that's controversial, it's risky that other people aren't posting, and she quickly realized, you know, that's

the way to become an influencer. So after that moment, her content dramatically changed and it became a lot more you know, sexual, new window and her captions, her dance moves were more suggestive, her clothing was more revealing, and she was really gaming the algorithm in a way. She knew that she would be rewarded if she posted content that got people talking, so the algorithm actually incentivized her to behave in this way and rewarded her by doing so.

So then if we fast forward to what her account is like now as a sixteen year old, she's posting content that to her is kind of normalized. This is what she's been doing for years, and she doesn't think there's anything wrong with it. Where is Rosalie's father in all of this? Rosalie's father is there. He's present, He's in some of her clips. Her most successful TikTok post is actually her doing quite a sexually suggestive dance and he picks her up and carries her out of the frame,

acting as though he's shocked by what she's doing. That got a hundred and sixty million views on tick too, and her dad is supporting her. He's proud of her. He thinks that if this is going to help her make money, get her through college, make her a bit of person, then why not you heard Olivia mentioned money just now. That's another element of this story. Creators can't receive money directly from TikTok unless they're over the age of eighteen, but some brands are eager to capitalize on

their fame and reach their followers. Yeah, tein talk is big business. These influences are making tens of thousands of dollars in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars a month because their following is so big. So Rosalie Ertoler has brand deals with a number of fashion outlets, from Fashion Over to she in Too Pretty Little Thing. She

just released a clothing line with empty soda. She's got a little baby pink miniskirt with a matching top with a cutout love heart in the middle, and she's advertised using it on TikTok and encouraging her followers, her seven million followers to go and buy it. Is part of the encouragement that Rosalie gets from her parents, the money

that she makes from this. I remember asking Maria about that directly, and she said, the first time they got a brand deal, she actually ran into Rosalie's room screaming, we made it. You know what I mean, We made it like ten you know, ten grand for five posts. I mean, it's insane, dude. Um, it's the norm for me. Now it's the norm for us. You know, We've got this ten thousand dollar brand deal. This means that you're an influencer and everyone was wrong and we did it.

And they feel as though they had finally achieved a huge milestone in life. Usually I make from a company, what I make from a company is maybe like tens of fifteen, depending on how much they're willing to pay. And then and that's not for like some promos. That's like brand deals like clothing brands and promoting like a

product or something, and then um and total. I'm not sure how much I've made over the past year, but I know right now in my seevings I have like about thirty safter So these fashion companies actually stand to make a lot of money from creators like Rosalieeritola or you know her Jenny Pope patch account, because it's a brilliant marketing strategy to encourage the creators themselves to be your advertisement. No longer do we have to pay for

television advertisements. You can just pay a creator like Jenny Pope Petch to wear a dress in one of her videos, and seven million people are going to see it, and they're going to want to be like her. They're going to want to be wearing the clothes that she's wearing, and maybe they're going to go and buy that item when we come back. I talked to Olivia about some of the people who aren't such big fans of Jenny Popatch and her fame, and what life is like for

the kid behind the persona. We've heard Olivia describe how Jenny Papach is a larger than life character in her videos on TikTok, but just how does this play out in the day to day real life of Rosalie Aratola. I've been looking at her posts for months before I traveled down there, and I've been seeing a lot of comments on her posts from concerned followers, people who genuinely

believed that her life was in danger. They thought that she had been kidnapped, or that she was being stalked, or that her parents were forcing her to perform in this way. People are convinced that in some of her videos, she's actually mouthing the words help to her audience before

she starts dancing. And as I was looking through this account, reading these comments, I decided that I actually wanted to get a sense of who she was and where does this controversy stem from, and what does she think about all this? And I was quite surprised at the girl that I met. She was very eloquent, very well spoken.

I assumed by watching her content that she was going to open the door in a skin type body suit or a mini skirt with her two inch fake nails on, and you know, her hair extensions in and a full face of makeup. But she was in this baggy hoodie. She hadn't even brushed her here, She had no makeup on she was very natural. She looked like a child. She looked a lot younger than what she does in

her content on TikTok Um. Some of the pros and cons of being an influencer was like a lot of followers six seven billion, you don't really know who to trust as far. I feel like it's just very hard to create genuine friendships, and it's hard to feel like you even have genuine and that everything is now transactional. It's been quite challenging for her to actually make friends. She feels as though anyone who is nice to her and tries to befriend her is only doing so because

they want to increase their own following. They want to be in a video with Jenny Pope Patch and you know, use her effectively. Well, I feel like it's easy for Jenny.

I'm just kidding. I mean, I find it easier to find collaborators, but I don't consider every person I collab with a friend because I feel like a friend is somebody you call and you hang out with them every day, and you trust them and you feel like you can trust them with your personal experiences and your personal thoughts, and you're not afraid to be yourself with them, and I don't find myself like that with a lot of

the people I collab with. And when I saw her personality online, she comes across as confident, outgoing, empowered, aware of who she is and what she wants in life, but when you meet her in person, she's less sure of herself. She mentioned that she has seven million followers but no real friends. What does TikTok say about the guidelines about Jenny's account and about making decisions about where to leave up and what to take down. TikTok says,

it's guidelines are really clear and it's not wrong. You can go on to its website and you can open up the minor safety tab and see the specificity that it goes into on its guidelines. TikTok doesn't comment on individual accounts for privacy reasons, so it wouldn't make any comment about the Jennie Poe Patch account or tell me why it deactivated her account twice where it reactivated it twice.

TikTok didn't want to weigh in on that, but it says that it has very strict minor safety policies and it encourages all of its content moderate is to abide by them. We'll hear more a bit later about what the company does to enforce those guidelines, But there are any number of so called vigilante parents on the platform who have taken it upon themselves to try to police TikTok. They flag videos they say violate the apps rules once they feel our inappropriate content from minor to make and

for other kids and adults to be looking at. She's also caught the attention of vigilantes or watchdog moms or other creators who are scanning through TikTok looking for content that highlights the dark side of influencer culture, that highlights child exploitation on the air, and they are holding up this Jenny Popetch account as an example of a young creator who is doing inappropriate things and being rewarded by TikTok's algorithm, which is pushing her onto the for you

page and increasing her popularity, increasing her fame, increasing her followers, which in turn is resulting in her getting more and more brand deals from fashion companies, more money, more fame, and so it goes on. One of those people is a woman named Sarah Adams. She's a mom who's gotten quite a TikTok following herself for calling out what she sees as problematic videos by Jenny Papa and other TikTok stars.

Olivia went to talk to her. I'm Sarah Adams. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I am mom uncharted on tiktar. She's calling out not only the specific accounts like the Jinny Pope petch account, but the parents, the brands that are paying her, and the platforms like TikTok. Why are you allowing this kind of content to stay up? Um? I look at a lot of different issues, Um. The three main ones that I always discuss our issues of privacy,

informed consent and safety. And the safety kind of goes alongside with the sexualization of our young children. I think there's a lot of sexualized content in regard to song choices, style of dances, clothing poses. You know, it's not just clothing, it's the clothing paired with the situation and the lyrics

and the dance moves. It's all of it. And a lot of Sarah Adams posts she calls TikTok out for not upholding it's minus safety guidelines and the most ironic thing is that her own videos are actually being removed for minus safety violations, but the original video she's posting

about will remain up. You mean they're being removed because she's pointing to videos and on the basis of that content, which hasn't been removed, her account is being remove That's right, her account, her videos are being removed for highlighting what she believes is problematic content being produced by children. I am not sexualizing a child. I am letting you know as a parent that there are people who are sexualizing your children. And this is a public platform with a

billion people, including the worst of society. And what does Rosalie say about this criticism. She feels as though people are unfairly judging her and that she should be able to do what she wants to do on the app. She thinks that other creators who are highlighting her content is problematic are actually sabotaging her career. And I think it's really important to try and understand what these creators, like Rosaliera tolder. What is the intention behind the posts?

Is she posting her content to try and be sexually appealing or is she posting her content because that's who she is? And this is what fifteen and sixteen year old girls are doing. Now. This is kind of normalized for this age group. And the question I suppose is does she understand the full implications of what she's doing or does she not. From talking to Rosalie Aritoler, I think she is aware of what she's posting. I think she knows what she's doing, she knows what she's selling.

She's a very smart teenage girl, and she enjoys the fame. She mentioned to me that she got over three point four million likes when she posted a video wearing Christmas onesie and how exciting that was to her. TikTok. To these kids, it's like a drug to them. It's so easy to become addicted to an app where every day it you know, feeds you the content that you want to see, but also allows you to perform on this

huge stage and become famous. After spending a week with with Rosalie and her mom, I felt like Rosalie really wants to do this. This is the life that she wants to have. Um, it's definitely satisfying to see that your creation, you know, whatever your content creating is getting views, it's getting likes, it's getting engagement in comments. Because you make your original content, people like it, people start doing it.

You become a trendsetter, or you create trends, you make twist to trends, and it feels good like I did that. You know, I created something, people enjoyed it, and I feel like the likes and the views and all of that are just the product, Like you just see the outcome like that. And where does that leave TikTok, the platform that hosts all these trends. What's the company's stance on this whole controversy. We talk about that when we return.

You know, when you look at the TikTok website and you look at its community guidelines, they do have a specific tab for minor safety, and they state very clearly that you cannot post, upload, stream, or share any content that implies or depicts a minor in a sexual way. That's including a minor with sexually explicit song lyrics or content with sexually explicit dancing of a minor. And it even specifies saying this includes twerking, breast shaking, pelvic thrust ng,

fondling of the briasts. So they're very specific about what can stay on and what should come down. In response to pressure from lawmakers, in February, TikTok said it would place new restrictions on what it calls overtly sexually suggestive content. It said users under sixteen would no longer be eligible to appear on the apps for you page. That's this

algorithm curated feed that recommends videos to users. But users under sixteen can still appear in the four you feed of those who already follow them, and the new rule won't affect Jenny Papach's videos. She turned sixteen in November. I think the problem is for the individual moderators whose

job it is to make that decision. At the end of the day, they have a judgment call to make in just twenty seconds, and they have to look at a thousand videos a day, and it is very hard to decide if a video is sexually suggestive or not. What is the day of a moderator for TikTok look like. Content moderators at TikTok are effectively scanning through videos that have been uploaded to the platform where the artificial intelligence have flagged them as violating one of TikTok's community guidelines.

So first computers search through these and then they throw out flags based on algorithms that compare it to lots of different photos and say, this looks like possibly content that violates the standards. That's exactly right. So the artificial intelligence scans through every single video that's been uploaded to the platform. That's twenty billion in the first half of this year. The AI is looking for content that violates

community guidelines. And some of that is obvious, like nudity, violence, hate speech, extremist behavior, they'll just take that down immediately. The artificial intelligence isn't sure, and it doesn't know if if this content is particularly violating guidelines or not. It will send it through to a human moderator to decide. So they're looking at videos that the artificial intelligence has flagged as being potentially problematic, and they're deciding if it

should stay up or if it should come down. And you said they have twenty seconds to do this. Is that a standard or is that just what it takes they get through the day. They are expected to review a thousand videos a day, and they have about twenty seconds to look at each video. But some TikTok clips are only a couple of seconds long, others are longer,

so they've got to make very quick judgment calls. And to add a further layer of complexity on this already very complex issue, TikTok has an if in doubt leave it up mantra. What that means is that the moderators are effectively told, if you don't know, leave it up, rather than taking it down, and that Mantra has allowed a lot of Jenny Pope Patches content to stay on the platform even when on face vale you it looks like it's violating some of those minor safety guidelines. But

let me ask you about that. Because the safety guidelines that you just described seemed very specific. It also sounds from your description of her videos that some of the things described in those guidelines are in fact in those videos. Why would there be a when in doubt situation when the things explicitly spelled out in the guidelines are in the videos. Yeah, I mean I have a good example

of this from her account. She recently posted a video that was part of a TikTok trend where she's washing the new car that she just bought with her TikTok earnings. So she's in the car wash, she's in a gray skin type body suit and white heeled boots, and she is leathering foam on the car with her chiest. She's winking at the camera. She's dancing covered in water and

foam from the car wash. With that particular video, a lot of older men have been taking screen shots of her bent over the car or her and various poses that are sexually suggestive and have been sharing them with one another and various group threads on other social media platforms. In one particular forum, I was looking through some of these photos were being swapped and one person commented saying, guys,

this is CP the acronym for CPS child porn. So that video in and of itself, what she was doing was sexually suggestive, but it was part of a TikTok trend, So she was doing something that a lot of other people had done in order to get it trending. And I sent this video to a Trust and Safety team worker to ask him, do you think that this should have come down? He looked at it and told me no, why would we take it down? She's fully clothed. When you're a moderator, it comes down to your viewpoint of

what's sexually suggestive. And what's not So TikTok is really stuck in the middle between the creators, some of the young creators who are posting sexually suggestive content, and the watchdog moms or the vigilante creators who are calling them out and calling the platform out for not doing enough to protect kids. One of the difficulties that TikTok faces is that it's just overwhelmed by content. If we think about the first half of this year, TikTok removed more

than two hundred million videos. More than of those videos were taken down because they violated a minor safety guideline. That's a huge number of videos, two hundred million. But in that same period, twenty billion videos were uploaded to the platform. So how do you as a content moderation team, as a trust and safety team that is set up to try and pretend to uses and take down problematic conteen, how do you begin when you have twenty billion videos?

It is just an impossible task. Thanks so much to Olivia Carville for coming back on the podcast. You can read Olivia's Bloomberg Business Week stories about TikTok at Bloomberg dot com and special thanks to the video team behind the audio you heard in this episode Andrea Deski and Dmitri salv Chuck and if you want to hear the story of TikTok's rise from startup to social media juggernaut and how it became the center of US China tensions.

It's season two of Bloomberg's foundering podcast, The TikTok Story. Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Tech. It's the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app podcast or wherever you listen. Read today's story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com. Slash Big Take, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with questions or comments to Big Take at

Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Burgalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producer is Rebecca Shasson. Our associate producer is Sam Gobauer. Hilda Garcia is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidrin. I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take