Criminals, Crystal Meth, Pedophiles, and Pornography: How Did the Teen Social Messaging App Kik Become a Haven for Depravity?

On April 11, 2018 The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) passed the U.S. Senate and House jointly as a bill called the FOSTA-SESTA package and became the law of the land.

The law, which led to the collapse of the social media site Tumblr and forced Craigslist to cease its personals was intended to correct and clarify the country’s sex trafficking law to “make it illegal to knowingly assist, facilitate, or support sex trafficking, and amend Section 230 of the FCC part of the safe harbors of the Communications Decency Act (which make online services immune from civil liability for the actions of their users) to exclude enforcement of federal or state sex trafficking laws from its immunity.

The FCC’s Section 230 safe harbor was established in 1996, making the providers of “interactive computer services” immune from liability under civil laws for the actions of their users if they publish objectionable content (such as defamatory and obscene content). Section 230 has been considered a key piece of internet legislation, as operators of online services that handle user-generated content are not liable for civil wrongs committed by their users, if the service was not directly involved in the offending content. These protections do not apply to criminal or intellectual property law which is telling. Since the advent of social media, it has almost  been exclusively invoked by Facebook lawyers arguing that section 230 absolves them from taking money from right wing, racist hate.

In an op-ed by Senator Rob Portman, in the Toledo Blade,  numbers from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), showed an 846% increase in reports of suspected child sex trafficking to the organization from 2010 to 2015. He attributed this largely to Backpage, an online classifieds service that had been accused of knowingly accepting ads which facilitated child sex trafficking, and filtered specific keywords in order to obfuscate it. The site had faced legal disputes, and a government investigation spearheaded by Portman. Portman argued that Section 230 was being used to “protect its unscrupulous business practices”, and that Section 230 protections “were never intended to apply – and they should not apply – to companies that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking.”

And to clarify, there isn’t even the suggestion that section 230 was intended to absolve social media platforms in this way. In the same way that it was not written to protect books. If a book or magazine publisher had a platform: whether it’s their website or printed materials, and they used that platform to depict child pornography or any number of objectionable materials, that publisher/platform would face swift and hostile reaction from both the public and by law makers.

Attempts to stop Backpage and similar sites via the court system failed, as the Courts affirmed these sites has protection via Section 230, and those seeking action failed to enjoin the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the matter.

The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act amended Section 1591 of Title 18 of the United States Code to add a definition of “participation in a venture”, as knowingly assisting, facilitating, or supporting sex trafficking. It amends section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code to state that it is policy to “ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal and civil law relating to sex trafficking”, and that section 230 does not impair enforcement of “any State criminal prosecution or civil enforcement action targeting conduct that violates a Federal criminal law prohibiting [sex trafficking]”, nor “impair the enforcement or limit the application of section 1595 of title 18, United States Code.”

So why did Craigslist decide in the wake of this legislation to cease their popular romance and sex connections?

According to NPR: The company says it made the change because Congress has passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, meant to crack down on sex trafficking of children. It was approved by a landslide in the Senate earlier this week, as NPR’s Alina Selyukh has reported, but has been met with criticism by free speech advocates and sex workers. As Craigslist wrote, the law seeks “to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully.”

“Any tool or service can be misused,” Craigslist said. “We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.”

The site added: “To the millions of spouses, partners and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!”

Which brings us to Kik. The popular messenger service that was started by Canadian college students at the University of Waterloo in 2009.

Kik uses a smartphone’s data plan or Wi-Fi to transmit and receive messages, photos, videos, sketches, mobile web pages, and other content after users register a username. Kik is known for its features preserving users’ anonymity, such as allowing users to register without the need to provide a telephone number or valid email address. However, the application does not employ end-to-end encryption, and the company also logs user IP addresses, which could be used to determine the user’s ISP and approximate location.This information, as well as “reported” conversations are regularly surrendered upon request by law enforcement organizations, sometimes without the need for a court order.

Kik was originally intended to be a music-sharing app before transitioning to messaging, briefly offering users the ability to send a limited number of SMS text messages directly from the application. During the first 15 days after Kik’s re-release as a messaging app, over 1 million accounts were created. In May 2016, Kik Messenger announced that they had approximately 300 million registered users, and was used by approximately 40% of United States’ teenagers.

I first became aware of Kik in 2016 when I was writing and producing a series of spots on a new, largely unheard of drug that could prevent HIV called Truvada aka PrEP. Kik had been raised numerous times as one of the social media apps we were considering using to deploy the campaign. We also used and demonstrated how to use both Kik and Grindrr to members of Public Health Solutions, the Department of Health, and in particular Mary Ann Chiasson, as they were suspected primary vectors of HIV transmission in the United States.

Less than a year later, Kik was on my radar again, again related to HIV transmission, which had suddenly spiked. In my role as Senior Editor at Pride Media, I oversaw Plus magazine, the first and oldest continuously published HIV magazine. I also was the Digital Director for HIVPlusMag.com, their corresponding website and mobile app. I was alarmed at the data presented in the CDC’s 2017 HIV Surveillance Report, that showed that although  HIV rates of transmission continued to decline overall in the United States, there was a new trend, a spike among a new population: gay identified males ages 13 to 14 and among male youth in general aged 24-29. Without any research and due to privacy laws around children, not a single explanation  was offered suggesting why the spike happened at all.

Perry N. Halkitis, the head of the Rutgers School of Public Health, the country’s largest, is gay and worked for years in the HIV field, he told me that unfortunately, when it comes to minors, researchers hands are tied as they cannot ask them, even if they are potentially at-risk if they are gay.

LONDON, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 24: The “Grindr” app logo is seen on a mobile phone screen on November 24, 2016 in London, England. Following a number of deaths linked to the use of anonymous online dating apps, the police have warned users to be aware of the risks involved, following the growth in the scale of violence and sexual assaults linked to their use. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Yet the answer was staring me in the face: Kik  and Grindr. The two most  populated and expansive “space” where predators and children had the highest likelihood to interact “socially.” I knew this from our forays using both apps in the past that there was a preponderance of underage users on both platforms. And because in 2016 the New York Times in a feature story identified Kik as the “defacto app’ for child predators.”

That Times stated that the app was becoming an increasing concern for law enforcement officials, with a number of instances where predators have used the app to exchange child pornography, to send explicit messages or arrange meetings with minors. At the time, Kik was working to take steps to “assist in preventing child exploitation,” which included posting a law enforcement guide and sponsoring an annual conference on crimes against children.

A year later The Verge reported that noticing that not much had changed since the Times expose, Point and Forbes collaborated on a joint investigation and produced a report that stating that Kik was still cited by law enforcement as the primary tool used by predators, with one official writing that the app is popular because “it is free, simple to set up, easily accessible, potentially anonymous and allows users to share digital data privately.”

On an app that 13 years-old are allowed to join a platform hosts chat rooms centered around kinky sex and crystal meth amphetamine use, with a flimsy verification process and in some, no verification.

The joint report also found accounts belonging to users convicted of child abuse had not been  removed. When investigating some of the gay groups, in virtually every chat rooms there were numerous inquiries as to whether or not you are into “taboo or pervy?”

“Taboo” is a code word for child pornography and “Pervy” relates to bestiality and worse, I learned. The porn peddlers would then often flood your feed, unsolicited, with examples in the hope that you will want more despite repeated requests, no one at Kik responded to numerous complaints from members of my team of child pornography being sent, unsolicited.

And  this isn’t the first time or only time that Kik has been linked to crimes against children.

Point and Forbes spoke with child advocacy groups, which indicated that Kik could be doing more to combat abuse, such as adding more privacy controls and being more responsive to user complaints, and worryingly, haven’t removed profiles of users who have been charged and convicted of child abuse.