Impact

TikTok attacks Maldita for reporting on child sexual abuse on its platform: here’s why we went to the Public Prosecutor after several investigations in which TikTok ignored our warnings

10 November 2026

On the afternoon of Monday 9 November, after we published the first articles of our investigation ‘TikTok, home to predators’, the platform leaked a statement to the press that included an accusation against Maldita.es: “As bad actors continually evolve their methods to evade detection, a collective response is vital, and we urge Maldita to share its findings in full. Their refusal is actively preventing us from locating and removing this material, as well as hindering reporting to law enforcement.”

Our reply: Maldita.es uses the legal reporting mechanisms available to every citizen, not privileged, private and opaque channels, as TikTok would like

TikTok claims its technology works, but instead of taking responsibility in the face of the evidence, it has chosen to launch a smear campaign against a non-profit foundation that, through multiple investigations, has shown evidence of the platform’s inaction on child sexual abuse.

TikTok has not contacted us again since Friday

On Friday at 10:10am we emailed TikTok setting out what we had found and asking a series of questions:

Maldita.es’s email to TikTok, 6 November 2026.

At 3:07pm TikTok replied asking us to send them “accounts, videos, hashtags, links” by email. We cannot do that. Sending videos of child sexual abuse, or the links that lead to them, by email might be akin to distributing that material or facilitating access to it, regardless of who sends it to whom. Neither Maldita.es nor anyone else should be passing that material from inbox to inbox. Besides, TikTok already has it: we reported a sample of what we found through the official channels of its own platform.

So we replied that in our investigations we use the channels the law provides for everyone to report illegal content: the point is for those mechanisms to work. And we invited them to talk once the investigation was published. TikTok has not contacted us since.

This is not an excessive precaution. In 2017, the BBC alerted Facebook to sexualised images of children on its platform. Facebook’s response was to report the journalists to the police for sending them the images and to cancel the interview.

We already handed over our database once: nothing changed

It is important to note that six months ago we found 1,300 child predators on the platform. TikTok was not even able to locate the reports we had made through the official channels of its platform, so we handed over OUR ENTIRE database. Six months later, we have found 26,000 more. What did TikTok do with the information we gave it?

On 9 November, instead of providing answers, TikTok leaked an unfounded accusation to the press: that Maldita.es is preventing content from being removed from its platform. From ITS platform. How could a non-profit organisation with 10 researchers prevent a massive international company from doing anything, a platform that makes over 8 billion euros a year in Europe, the UK and Latin America alone?

That is why we have filed a criminal complaint against TikTok with the Spanish Cybercrime Prosecutor’s Office. Since TikTok will not comply with its own rules, we sure hope it will have to comply with the law.

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