December 12, 2022 • 33 mins
Bloomberg Investigative reporter Olivia Carville has spent months delving into TikTok, the hugely popular video social network. In November, she joined the podcast to talk about children who have died copying dangerous video challenges of the kind that can be seen on the app. Today, Olivia is back to talk about her latest story about TikTok for Bloomberg Businessweek.
It follows the life of a 16-year-old girl from Florida whose provocative videos have won her millions of followers–and many detractors who say TikTok shouldn’t allow this kind of content from minors on the platform.
Learn more about this story here: https://bloom.bg/3Ph6mJz
Listen to the first conversation with Olivia about TikTok’s problem moderating the dangerous challenges HERE.
Listen to The Big Take podcast every weekday and subscribe to our daily newsletter: https://bloom.bg/3F3EJAK
Have questions or comments for Wes and the team? Reach us at bigtake@bloomberg.net.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's the Big Take from Bloomberg News and iHeart Radio.
I'm West Cosova. Today our second look at TikTok, this
time through the eyes of a teen influencer. In November,
(00:27):
Bloomberg investigative reporter Olivia Carville came on the podcast. She
told the story of children who have died copying challenges
that can be seen on TikTok, the enormously popular video
social platform that has more than a billion users around
the world. TikTok doesn't want those videos on its app,
(00:47):
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
(01:11):
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.
(01:34):
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.
(01:56):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:41):
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
(03:06):
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
(03:30):
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
(03:51):
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
(04:14):
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.
(04:35):
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.
(04:59):
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
(05:22):
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,
(05:43):
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
(06:03):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:45):
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,
(07:07):
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
(07:29):
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,
(07:53):
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
(08:14):
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?
(08:37):
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
(09:01):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:44):
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,
(10:06):
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
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:11):
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
(11:34):
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
(11:56):
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
(12:19):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:23):
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,
(13:47):
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
(14:09):
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
(14:30):
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
(14:53):
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
(15:14):
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
(15:39):
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,
(16:00):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:40):
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.
(17:03):
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.
(17:23):
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
(17:45):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:31):
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
(18:53):
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.
(19:16):
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
(19:39):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:44):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:29):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:34):
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?
(22:58):
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
(23:22):
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
(23:44):
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
(24:05):
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
(24:28):
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
(24:50):
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.
(25:19):
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.
(25:40):
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
(26:02):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:10):
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
(27:31):
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
(27:54):
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
(28:16):
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
(28:38):
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
(29:00):
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
(29:23):
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
(29:44):
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
(30:05):
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
(30:30):
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,
(30:51):
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
(31:12):
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
(31:37):
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
(31:59):
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
(32:19):
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.
(32:45):
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.
(33:07):
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.
(33:29):
I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big
Take
It's the Big Take from Bloomberg News and iHeart Radio.
I'm West Cosova. Today our second look at TikTok, this
time through the eyes of a teen influencer. In November,
(00:27):
Bloomberg investigative reporter Olivia Carville came on the podcast. She
told the story of children who have died copying challenges
that can be seen on TikTok, the enormously popular video
social platform that has more than a billion users around
the world. TikTok doesn't want those videos on its app,
(00:47):
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
(01:11):
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.
(01:34):
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.
(01:56):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:41):
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
(03:06):
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
(03:30):
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
(03:51):
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
(04:14):
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.
(04:35):
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.
(04:59):
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
(05:22):
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,
(05:43):
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
(06:03):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:45):
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,
(07:07):
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
(07:29):
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,
(07:53):
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
(08:14):
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?
(08:37):
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
(09:01):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:44):
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,
(10:06):
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
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:11):
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
(11:34):
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
(11:56):
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
(12:19):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:23):
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,
(13:47):
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
(14:09):
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
(14:30):
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
(14:53):
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
(15:14):
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
(15:39):
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,
(16:00):
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
(16:20):
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
(16:40):
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.
(17:03):
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.
(17:23):
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
(17:45):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:31):
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
(18:53):
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.
(19:16):
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
(19:39):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:44):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:29):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:34):
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?
(22:58):
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
(23:22):
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
(23:44):
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
(24:05):
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
(24:28):
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
(24:50):
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.
(25:19):
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.
(25:40):
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
(26:02):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:10):
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
(27:31):
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
(27:54):
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
(28:16):
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
(28:38):
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
(29:00):
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
(29:23):
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
(29:44):
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
(30:05):
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
(30:30):
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,
(30:51):
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
(31:12):
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
(31:37):
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
(31:59):
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
(32:19):
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.
(32:45):
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.
(33:07):
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.
(33:29):
I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big
Take
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.