Ariani Arroyo was a nine-year-old girl who lived down in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When COVID-19 shut down her school and she was at home all the time, she became obsessed with TikTok. One evening in early 2021, Ariani was playing with her little brother before bedtime. Her father came upstairs to see what he was talking about and that's when he found Ariani lifeless,. She wrapped the middle dog leash around her neck and she hooked the buckle onto the hinge of a wardrobe door.
A heads up: This episode is on a difficult subject and some of it isn’t easy to listen to. You might want to listen with headphones if children are nearby.
In just a few short years, TikTok has become as ubiquitous as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The brief videos and fun dance challenges that TikTok’s one billion users post on its app often become viral sensations.
But there’s a darker side to the platform, and one TikTok is having a hard time fixing. Young children who aren’t supposed to have full access to the app are finding ways around the company’s safeguards and logging on. When they do, they're exposed to some content that's not suitable for kids, including viral videos that challenge users to do dangerous things– sometimes, with tragic results.
Bloomberg senior reporter Olivia Carville joins this episode to discuss her investigation of how kids are using TikTok–and what the company is doing about it.
You can read Olivia’s full investigation here: https://bloom.bg/3isBcmo
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