Spain Weighs TikTok Suspension

Spain is weighing a possible suspension of TikTok after a Spanish nonprofit said it found more than 1,000 child sexual abuse videos on the platform, with a combined 48 million views, and tens of thousands of accounts it classified as suspected paedophile profiles.

The findings come from Maldita.es, an independent foundation focused on disinformation and transparency, which said it monitored TikTok for 35 days across September and October. In that period, it reported identifying about 26,000 suspected predator accounts in total, including 7,000 in Spanish, and said it had passed the details to authorities.

What makes the report harder to shrug off as a routine moderation failure is not only the quantity of material alleged to be on the platform, but the way Maldita.es says TikTok itself helped surface it. The group said it created test accounts to observe recommendation patterns and found that, within three days, the algorithm suggested 19 livestreams by minors, including 15 in a single morning, many filmed from schools. It also accused TikTok of profiting when adults used paid gifts during sexualised interactions involving children.

Spain’s Ministry of Youth and Children said it had asked prosecutors to act over alleged cases of child sexual abuse on TikTok and that Minister Sira Rego had requested an urgent meeting with the company’s representatives in Spain. The ministry has also raised the possibility of suspending the platform.

Maldita.es said its investigation identified 231 profiles posting 1,183 explicit pieces of content, 780 accounts allegedly used to attract buyers, and more than 10,000 accounts that sought exchanges of sexual images in comments. It also said TikTok had removed only a tenth of the content it flagged by the time the findings were made public, and had blocked only a quarter of illegal posts in Spain. Those claims are from the nonprofit’s investigation; the excerpt available here does not include TikTok’s direct response to this specific report.

That matters because platforms often defend themselves by pointing to scale, automated enforcement and reporting tools. Scale is real. So is the accusation that abuse was not buried at the edges of the app but woven into recommendation, livestreaming and gifting features. If Spanish authorities decide the platform’s design is part of the problem, this stops being only a content-moderation story and becomes a much more expensive one for TikTok.