US police warn of pornography in “musical.ly”

The popular app “musical.ly” lets you record short videos in which you can lip-synch and sing and dance to music. However, some content is not as harmless as it seems.

Pressetext reports that the social media app “Musical.ly” http://musical.ly , is supposed to lead children to pornographic content and encourage them to pose indecently. The Fargo Police Department is warning parents that the app is not as harmless as it seems at first glance.

Stripping and posing

Users can generate short videos in the app, often in karaoke style, and add the appropriate music to them. The app was originally developed for users aged 13 and over, but as with most social media platforms, there is no real verification when registering.

Children as young as nine or 10 years old often use the smartphone application to share sexually explicit videos of themselves, lip-sync dancing to popular songs with lyrics about oral sex and occasionally strip like their big pop idols, critics say . In addition, many hashtags on Musical.ly are in most cases inconspicuous at first glance, but according to Fargo Police, they could be used as a kind of code that leads to pornography and explicit images or posts.

bear responsibility

“There are many things that can be harmful to children’s health and well-being. With the current sex industry we are witnessing, this is definitely a problem. “I believe in parental responsibility and would definitely restrict my children’s access to certain websites,” said US father Daniel Johnston, commenting on the situation. According to its own statistics, Musical.ly has around 200 million users - almost ten million more than the instant messaging service Snapchat.