Indian Girls Are Lured Into Online Porn Via Chinese Video Sharing Apps By Pedophiles

The rise of social apps in India is extremely noticeable in recent years. It is not YouTube that we want to mention, but social video sharing apps that focus on 15-second-clips. What we need to be aware of is that how these apps are being abused and turning into a heaven for Indian pedophiles, according to some experts.

One app that needs to be mentioned is Kwai, which is based in Beijing and supported by Tencent, Chinese Internet giant. The app is similar to other other lip sync apps like TikTok and Musical.ly. The app works by allowing you to post videos that are only 15 seconds long. By using the apps, users can lip sync their songs of preference, having duets with other people or giving people a glimpse of their daily life.

According to a report, users of Kwai are not only teenagers. With more than 300 users globally, a great deal of India app users use this app to post about little girls. One example of this is “Gaon ki Bachchiya”, also known as Village Girls. This profile has almost 98,000 followers and in nearly every post, there are girls as young as 12 or even two or three year old girls. Sometimes, these clips can be innocent as they show these girls doing their housework. Sometimes, these clips involved girls dancing and lip syncing.

What we need to be worry is that these girls might be used for child pornography. A project manager for Cyber Peace Foundation, an NGO for anti-child porn, Nitish Chandan, also agrees with this. He told the press that: “Short video apps are the new platform where underage girls can be groomed for child pornography. He also mentioned that, last year, there was a small increase in child sexual abuse, harassment and blackmail cases. All of these cases were related to social apps similar to Kwai, where predators can easily go for a hunt and found their victims.

He might be right after all. Many comments from older men can be found on these young girls’ videos. These comments can be compliment about the girls’ bodies, dance moves. They were also asked to show more skin.

This makes activists working against child abuse terrified as this is something they have never seen before. These men gradually groom children to be more comfortable in doing something they are usually too nervous to do. Once this is accomplished, it is easier for predators to exploit them because they have become easily suggestible.

Apps like Tik Tok and Kwai have become extremely popular in both rural and urban areas although they primarily aimed at middle class teenagers. India has become Kwai’s biggest market, just after China. This is probably due to cheap and easy access to mobile data. It’s not that the app is not being supervised. Kwai’s Indian head Ganta Murali said that to monitor inappropriate content, there are both human-assessed and automatic review. However, this team of moderators are in Beijing, so they are probably unaccustomed to those videos that are considered inappropriate in India.

Moreover, one of Kwai’s attraction is that most-followed accounts can make lots of money. One of the most successful Indian account owner says she earns around Rs 28,000 per month. This is probably why malicious adults use this kind of method to take advantage of children, not caring if they are their friends and family’s kids or even their own children.

While kids who are older and adult woman would definitely know if they are being manipulated, young children can be lured by the gamification of it. “Dance like that actress in that song. See how many points you have earned. We can record something even better.” It’s a concept that will terrify you and with apps with insufficient policing like this, children are becoming an easy target for child pornography.