Our investigation found children in camps in Syria are begging on TikTok Lives - while TikTok takes 70% of donations given to them. It’s taken months of work with @BBCArabic and BBC Eye to shed light on this… here’s how we found out 🧵
Hannah Gelbart
1,026 posts
Hannah Gelbart
@hannah_gelbart
BBC lead presenter & journalist and host of What in the World podcast
- Replying to @hannah_gelbartWe interviewed @Marwasf from non-profit @accessnow. She said TikTok was "creating and enabling an ecosystem that runs on the exploitation of people's suffering... in violation of its own policies and of the human rights" of displaced Syrian families. Such a powerful interview:
00:00 - Replying to @hannah_gelbartThanks to getting to the end of this crazy long thread! Full documentary will be on iPlayer later today: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00… And there's a shorter version on YouTube now: youtube.com/watch?v=lTrZSZ…
- I made this film in memory of my grandpa, David Herman. It’s the most personal story I’ve ever told on the BBC. My family is one of the ones that wasn’t meant to live, but we were more 200 people standing in Prague’s old town recreating a photo from 1945. bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-…
- Replying to @hannah_gelbartBut the phone she's using isn't hers. It belongs to Hamid, a 'TikTok middleman' who lives in the camp and told us he sold his goats to buy it. He films with 12 different families, for a 2-3 hours at a time, several times a day.
- We're trying out something new for the #BBCNewsSix and #BBCNewsTen - putting our top story up on @YouTube - and it's doing really well! Any thoughts?
- Replying to @hannah_gelbartWe built a programme to scrape TikTok data and monitor spending on TikTok gifts. The lives we tracked regularly received over $1000 an hour in gifts, but the families say they get very little. TikTok wouldn't tell us what cut it takes, so we decided to test it out...
- Replying to @hannah_gelbart and @BBCArabicI began to follow some accounts livestreaming from Syria, and thanks to TikTok's algorithm, I found more than 300... and noticed that the children were often saying the same thing...
00:00 - Replying to @hannah_gelbartHamid says he uses UK SIM cards to get his livestreams in the feeds of British TikTokers - he says they're the most generous. We found a shop selling UK SIM cards near the camp. The shopkeeper said the SIMs have doubled in value because people are using them for TikTok
- Replying to @hannah_gelbart and @BBCArabicIt all started in June, when I was contacted on Twitter and TikTok about this strange new trend. Lots of people were calling the videos scams
00:00 - Replying to @hannah_gelbartSo... what's next for TikTok? On my account this morning, I could still find dozens of families begging in Syria for live gifts... and now we know that almost 70% of the donations goes directly to TikTok
- Replying to @hannah_gelbartMona lives in this camp with her 6 daughters. Her husband was killed in an airstrike and her daughter Sharifa is nearly blind. She goes on TikTok Live to make money for an operation to save Sharifa's sight
- Replying to @hannah_gelbartBut some families feel exploited, like Dowkan, who says he wasn't allowed to stop the livestream to eat or take his medicine. He was saving up to pay for heart surgery for his daughter. After 8 days of TikTok lives, he says he was only paid $14.
