BuzzFeed News was able to find more than 20 Foopah challenge videos within an hour of them being posted on the platform, but thanks to this engagement, more were shown on the For You page. (BuzzFeed News will not link to or embed any videos other than Andrews's because we cannot guarantee that all users participating in the challenge are of legal age.) Even today, when BuzzFeed News opened the app, it found Foopah challenge videos in four of the first five videos it saw.
It's viral gold, combining sex and the feeling of winning on a giant tech platform with an easily replicable conceit. Andrews encountered a problem when her TikTok manager reported its existence. She quickly released several videos that brought traffic to her. Only Fans. “I've gotten more traffic in the last couple of days just from these new TikToks compared to the regular trends,” she said.
TikTok moderates content by first running videos through an automated system that uses computer vision to determine whether they contain any infringing content. its guiding principleswhich “prohibit nudity, pornography or sexually explicit content from being posted on our platform.” Anything deemed suspicious is then reviewed by a human moderator, but moderators are expected to review thousands of videos in a single shift, meaning they cannot scrutinize the video's content in detail.
Additionally, Andrews said, it is impossible to be sure that the people in the video are actually blinking. “Prove it,” she said. Some participants in the Fupa trend explicitly use an elbow or thumb instead of a breast or nipple appearing behind the door. (Andrews managed to actually get naked. “Yes, they're real,” she said when asked if her video showed her flashing her breasts.)
“This is yet another example of the content moderation system being pitted against a young, entrepreneurial audience,” said Liam McLaughlin, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who studies content moderation. “These moderators often take a few seconds to decide whether content violates the rules, and based on the Foopah examples I've seen, it took me several minutes to actually determine this. So even if content is flagged, human moderators may not be able to keep up.”
The spread of the Foopah challenge shows the power of the TikTok For You page and the algorithms it uses. “It shows videos that are not fined by TikTok from the word go could really go somewhere,” said Caroline Are, an innovation research fellow who studies the relationship between online abuse and censorship at Northumbria University in the UK. victim of overly censored content moderation in TikTok.)
TikTok has blocked access to a number of hashtags used to spread the videos, but content with one hashtag #foopahh_ has been viewed more than 7 million times in total, including 2 million views in the last week. According to TikTok, two-thirds of users using the hashtag are between the ages of 18 and 24.
About half of the more than 20 videos initially discovered by BuzzFeed News were removed within 48 hours, and many of the accounts behind them were deleted. But instead, more videos appeared. A TikTok spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “Nudity and sexually explicit content are prohibited on TikTok. We take appropriate action against any such content, including banning offensive hashtags and removing videos. We continue to invest heavily in our trust and safety efforts.”
It explores how social media platforms take an overly draconian approach to bodies and how content moderation guidelines are often weaponized by those who dislike or seek power over women. “One of the reasons why this may be happening, and one of the reasons why this strange format has started to gain popularity, is because the moderation of bodies on social media is notoriously puritanical,” she said.
Andrews, who has previously seen many of her TikTok accounts suspended, agrees. “You will be banned without explanation,” she said. “There's no rhyme. There's no reason. It's stupid.”
In addition to his concerns about the spread of explicit content to people who may not want to consume it, McLaughlin is concerned about the long-term consequences of this trend. “Other content creators who do not break the rules may find themselves subject to even harsher systems that will target them directly,” he said. “I can certainly imagine, for example, that those who talk about breastfeeding would be targeted.”
This is what worries sex workers on TikTok. Steph Oshiri, Canadian adult content creator, tweeted that the Foopah issue is “not a good look for us” and will have a negative impact on the ability of adult content creators to publish safe-for-work content on TikTok in the future. “I expect that in the next two weeks we will see a lot of accounts being suspended or rules being updated,” Oshiri added.
Other were concerned about the potential legal consequences if creators put minors at risk on the app, given TikTok's relatively young user base.
Are, who said her “position is 'I want boobs everywhere,'” believes the controversy surrounding the issue is further evidence of the double standard applied to women on social media. “Because we're talking about bodies, and especially women's bodies,” Are said, “everyone's like, 'Oh, well, bodies are harmful—won't somebody think about the kids?'
