But more videos had popped up to replace them. Two-thirds of the users engaging with the hashtag are aged between 18 and 24, according to TikTok’s own data.Īround half of the more than 20 videos BuzzFeed News initially found had been taken down within 48 hours, with many of the accounts behind them terminated. TikTok has blocked access to a number of the hashtags used to spread the videos, but content using one hashtag, #foopahh_, has been seen more than 7 million times overall, including 2 million views in the last week. (Are herself has been the victim of overly censorious content moderation on TikTok.) “It shows videos that are not penalized by TikTok from the word go can really go somewhere,” said Carolina Are, an innovation fellow studying the intersection between online abuse and censorship at Northumbria University in the UK. The spread of the Foopah challenge shows the power of TikTok’s For You page and the algorithms that it employs.

So even if the content is flagged by the filter, human moderators might not be able to keep up.” “These moderators are often given seconds to decide if content is rule-breaking, and from the Foopah examples I’ve seen, it’s taken me minutes to actually spot. “This is yet another instance where a content moderation system is pitted against an entrepreneurial younger audience base,” said Liam McLoughlin, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool studying content moderation. “Yes, they are real,” she said, when asked if her videos showed her flashing her breasts.) (Andrews copped to actually getting naked. Some participating in the Foopah trend are quite clearly using their elbow or thumb in place of a breast or nipple appearing around the door. TikTok moderates content by first running videos through an automated system that uses computer vision to see if they might contain any content that infringes on its guidelines, which “do not allow nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content on our platform.” Anything that is deemed suspicious is then looked at by a human moderator, but moderators are expected to look at a thousand videos in a single shift, meaning they cannot examine in detail a video’s contents.Īnd besides, Andrews said, there’s no way of knowing for sure that the people in the videos are actually flashing. “I've gotten more traffic in the past couple of days just from doing these new TikToks versus the regular trends,” she said. She quickly produced a handful of videos, which have driven traffic to her OnlyFans. Andrews came across the challenge when tipped to its existence by her TikTok manager. It’s viral gold, combining sex and the sense of getting one over on a giant tech platform with an easily replicable conceit. (BuzzFeed News will not be linking to or embedding any videos besides Andrews's, as we cannot guarantee all users taking part in the challenge are of legal age.) Even today, upon opening the app, BuzzFeed News encountered Foopah challenge videos in four of the first five videos it saw. Users encountering such content have been posting videos of their own mocking the ubiquity of boobs on their For You feeds.īuzzFeed News managed to find more than 20 Foopah challenge videos within an hour of being on the platform, only to be shown more on the For You page because of that engagement. Others show nudity in the reflection of faucets or mirrors. Some are close-up shots of someone's face, with an object in the foreground on the edge of the screen that appears to be their nipple. The videos include ones in which people flash the camera from a distance, partly obscured by a door, or peek a nipple around a corner. It’s all part of a trend called the Foopah challenge, named after the now-suspended account that initiated the flashing videos.

Over the last week and a half, TikTok users have been bombarded with videos in which users expose their breasts using a variety of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it techniques that manage to get around the platform’s content moderation systems. She adjusts the strap of her top and comes into the light, fully clothed.Īnd that’s just the beginning of this sort of content on TikTok. For a split second, you can see what looks like the side profile of Andrews’s breast - though it’s difficult to discern because of the lighting. In the background, on the edge of the bath, is a collection of sex toys. In a TikTok video that’s been viewed by some 2 million people in the last 24 hours, Texas content creator Amy Andrews is standing in the shadow of her bathroom doorway.

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