I do understand that someone doing that as a live stream on your app is not something you
would typically be prepared to handle. But you would think at the very least they will
call the police right? Hi, welcome back to me talking about whatever I want. Today I want to
talk about TikTok, but not the app itself. Today I'm talking about the company because I recently
found out that they did something a year ago that nobody found out about until about a week ago.
TikTok doesn't want us to know what's in this video, but I have pictures, I have articles,
I have everything. First of course I'd like to do my comments shout out from the last video
as always. This comment goes to Gillian Hernandez who says; "day eight of telling everyone D'Angelo
hid this account from us for over half a year." Now I did make this account over half a year ago,
but it was for some other stuff I had planned, but me switching to daily uploads,
that was the best decision I ever made. You may have noticed I took two days off.
Y'all I was literally just trying to process. I think I'm going to pass 100,000 subscribers this
month and three weeks ago I had 20,000, so. But I actually brought this comment up for two reasons;
one to thank you all for this unexpected success, but also because it perfectly fits the theme of
today's video. Yes, I did hide this account for half a year, but today we're going to talk about
what TikTok hid from us for over a year. It seems like I bring up TikTok every single week
and each time it's worse than it was before, right? I bring them up one week and it's about
their terrible censorship. I bring them up another week and it's about how they fail to crack down on
dangerous challenges. Well, I'm bringing them up this week because they have reached rock-bottom.
So I just want to give a quick trigger warning. This story centers around an individual who
took his own life. That's going to repeatedly come up as I go throughout the video. However,
there's no images or pictures of that so don't worry. So it all started in February when this
19 year old kid from Southern Brazil, he told his TikTok followers that he was going to be
planning a special performance the next day. And if you don't know, you can actually live stream
on TikTok the same way you can on Instagram. It's similar to that. Well, it turns out his special
performance was him turning on the camera, pointing it towards himself and then taking
his own life on camera. 280 people watched that and what was a horrifying end for this 19 year
old was of course at the beginning of a host of problems for TikTok the company, because they
handled this wrong at every single opportunity. And to be fair, I do understand that someone doing
that as a live stream on your app is not something you would typically be prepared to handle. But you
would think at the very least they would call the police, right? Right? So big mistake number
one was that this live stream remained going for an hour and a half. So for just 90 minutes,
you could go to his profile and it was just live footage of his body just right there on TikTok,
no gate, no nothing. And so obviously I would assume a lot those 280 people watching it
reported it. So again, I can't really blame them for the incident happening because they had no
way of knowing, but the fact that it stayed there for so long, it's just such a massive failure on
their moderation team. So they find out about an hour later and they don't call the police.
That's right. TikTok finds a livestream of somebody's body on their app and they do not alert
local authorities. Instead, their priority was to stop it from going viral. So the very first people
they called once they encountered this footage where their PR team, not the police. So I got
this from an article. This is an internal document from ByteDance, which is of course TikTok's parent
company. And this is from their Brazilian office. So you can see at 3:21 this individual began his
live stream and by 3:23 he had already done the deed. So it looks like it didn't cross anybody's
attention until 4:07 PM, which was 40 minutes later. And it just says, "ban 10 minutes user not
moving." So what I can just assume this means was that so many people had flagged it, that it auto
banned him for 10 minutes, which does make sense. Also, something I find really disgusting is that
under 3:23, when it says he did the deed, it says not proven. What do you mean not proven?
It's like at every angle, even in their internal documents, they are trying to minimize the effect
of what really happened here. So as you can see at 4:38, top creators sent screenshot in
WhatsApp groups. In other words, their moderation team failed so hard that they never realized what
happened. A TikTok influencer had to send a group chat... The actual TikTok employees.
And then that's when they realized, oh, hey, someone is currently broadcasting this on
our app. I can't understand how a moderation team could fail that spectacularly to where
someone who's not even working for you has to bring something that huge to your attention
when it was getting auto flagged already. Just sounds like they weren't checking it.
At 5:00 PM it seems like the community manager saw the message. Six minutes later they notified
the CCMT. And I'm guessing CCM is community management. In other words, they told their
people, Oh, hey, we have this going on. It says they asked for assistance gathering data from the
live streaming. And then two minutes later, they requested to ban him. And then five minutes later,
he was banned. So notice this, well obviously this should not be on their platform and they should
remove it immediately upon hearing it. They did this before alerting the authorities. So ByteDance
literally deleted the evidence. And at this point, if they had chosen not to tell anybody,
nobody would have known except those 200 people who saw that live chat. I cannot not believe they
would see something like this and then just remove it and not immediately say something.
So after they let their community management team know, and after they banned the user less
than 10 later, they notified their PR team. And here's the super weird part. There's a
30 minute gap, a 40 minute gap actually between them notifying their PR team and then notifying
their U.S. PR team. And then that conversation went on for an additional 40 minutes. So for
almost an hour and a half, they were just having a conversation about it. Nobody knew
that this had happened. The police didn't know, this individual's family didn't know. And then
you can see at 6:40 PM, they alerted ERT and I could be wrong, but I think this was them
finally alerting medical professionals that this had happened. And then as you can see a whopping
one hour and 20 minutes after that, they finally passed the information to local law enforcement.
So for a good three hours there, everyone that TikTok, the company, knew that this had happened
but nobody informed the police. And instead they just deleted the evidence and all the
while that individual was just there. Now you may be asking yourself, well,
what happened during those really long phone calls between the PR team? What could they possibly have
been talking about? Unfortunately we know. Because as you saw from the title, and as I said in the
beginning, this happened in February of 2019, a year ago. And for about 365 days nobody knew that
this had happened except TikTok, that guy's family and the couple hundred people who had
pinned to watch that live stream. And the reason that that happened in such a internet driven world
where some things happen and then they wind up trending on Twitter within 30 seconds. The
reason they were able to do that is because TikTok's priority was keeping the story out
of the news. And they did manage to do that for a year, but it looks like their time is running out.
So the way we even know this now is because a former employee came forward with those
documents. And that's why the story just broke a few days ago. So the way I discovered it was via
this Insider article right here, and I realized that this Insider article was based off of this
Intercept article, from February 5th of this year, just a few days ago. And this article
says this was the first time that the story had ever been written anywhere on the internet or
at all. Though TikTok's Brazilian office did not respond to a list of 10 specific questions sent
by the Intercept, the company did offer a short statement acknowledging that around a year ago,
it had removed content related to that from its network and alerted local authorities. That's
a technically true way of putting it. Yes, they did remove content related to that about a year
ago. And yes, they did alert local authorities, but there is a several hour gap between that.
So it gets worse. During that time that they were having these phone conversations and not
letting the police or this person's family know what had happened, they actually made themselves
and PR statement. This is their press release for media, "we are extremely saddened by this tragedy.
At TikTok is our top priority to create a safe and positive in-app environment. And we have developed
guidelines to foster a positive environment for everyone in this community. Moreover, we have
robust measures to protect users against misuse, including easy reporting mechanisms that enable
users to report content that violates our terms of use and community guidelines. We encourage
any users who need any support or those who are concerned about a friend to contact a prevention
hotline." Yeah, okay. Those robust measures and easy reporting mechanisms are clearly useless.
Also, I find that odd that in the statement about something so serious and so sad, they just
immediately go to, oh no guys, our reports work, ha ha. No they absolutely did not. Otherwise,
that would not have been on your platform for an hour and a half. But here's the thing about
this PR statement, they never delivered it. They never sent it out. They never gave it
to anybody. And that's because it didn't hit the news. So TikTok just figured, well guess we don't
have to say anything about it. This whole thing I read you, was a "just in case somebody finds out
about it." So their goal wasn't really to make a statement or express how sad they were over
that incident or any of that. Their goal was to stop the coverage at all costs. So for 48 hours,
they monitored the internet, all social media platforms, especially Twitter. And they just
looked to see, is this going to start trending? Are people going to start talking about this? And
after 48 hours nothing had happened and they came to the conclusion that they were safe.
They didn't have to put out a statement. Nobody would ever know of the way they handled this
disgusting situation. And they could just move on with their lives and go back to the other things
that they do, like collecting your kids' data and all that other stuff. Well nothing may have
happened in 48 hours but I sure as I contend for everybody to know this now. A year later,
the same company is bigger than ever. I think it's one of the biggest apps in the world,
if not the biggest app. And this is how they handle the things that happen on
their platform. And what's really disturbing to me is either something that serious and that
newsworthy and that egregious could happen. And we could just not know this for a year.
I wanted to know what else happened? What else happened in that year? What else happened last
week? What's happening right now on TikTok that we don't know because they are so good at
covering things up that we'll never know unless somebody leaves the company and then informs
us. And here's the thing, TikTok's probably refusing to say anything about it right now,
because it's still not spreading that far. There's obviously the original Intercept article. And
then of course there is the Business Insider article, which is how I found it. And now I
see people reporting it at Futurism, Screen Rant, Dazed, The Daily Dot. But that's the thing, these
are not huge publications. This is not really mainstream media. It's big but for some reason
bigger companies are just leaving this one alone. And it really makes me wonder, when the mainstream
media capitalizes so much on these sort of situations, why did they not immediately on this?
How come when TikTok themselves confirmed that this happened, this still didn't wind up on CNN,
NBC, etc. This is pure speculation but it really makes me wonder, is TikTok conversing with these
people? Did they pay to keep it out of the news? Seriously, just explain to me in a way
that makes sense, how this is not the biggest story in the world right now, when it's been
confirmed and smaller publications are covering it and we have the internal documents. It's a
horrifying conclusion that I can come to. But my only guess is that TikTok is somehow preventing
these bigger people from talking about it. And of course the only way that would make sense to
do that is money. And of course that wouldn't be hard when you're the biggest app in the world. So
basically just tweet about this, tell people, make a post about it. Just make people aware, make it
to where there's no way these bigger companies can ignore it unless they're just admitting by
emission that they've been paid off by TikTok. We cannot let companies get away with this sort
of thing, because it's not as simple as ooh, people are doing dumb challenges or ooh, people
are doing like dumb dances. It's not even as simple as, Oh someone's account was hacked,
that's a little iffy. They mishandled a matter of life and death and they prioritized their
company's image over someone else's life. And they deleted evidence before they handed it over to
local law enforcement. It's beyond rock-bottom. I expect the worst from TikTok and ByteDance at all
times, I do. But how could I have expected this? In conclusion, I'm sorry to that person's family.
Of course it has been a year. I'm glad that he's remained anonymous and they're not being blasted
everywhere. But I'm not sorry for TikTok and the massive amount of trouble you're going to get
into if even a small portion of people find this video right here. So congratulations ByteDance
you tried to keep that under wraps, but I don't know why you thought that would work. Even if
it did work for a year, it's the internet. You can't hide anything. So ultimately who cares?