Bloomberg’s Storylines explores how one girl’s account is highlighting the platform’s problematic content, and how difficult it may be to police it.
(Bloomberg) — Roselie Arritola, who goes by the name Jenny Popach on TikTok, is one of the platform’s most controversial stars. The 16-year-old’s account is filled with hypersexual posts—what she and her mother describe as “shock-value content”—in which she dances in string bikinis, body rolls in hot pants or drops innuendo in captions (“When men can go to jail for being with you”).Her mother, Maria Ulacia, and her father, Jorge Arritola, say they are fully invested in their daughter’s influencer aspirations. The Florida teen has 7 million followers and fashion brands have flocked to her, eager to capitalize on her sex appeal and paying a small fortune for her to wear their clothes. And while many of Arritola’s followers are indeed teenage girls who would be their target demographic, many others are not there to see which dress she’s wearing.
And this is what has some people furious.
On this episode of Bloomberg’s Storylines, we meet the Arritola family as well as online critics who loudly call out what they view as child exploitation, assailing the content “creators,” their parents and especially TikTok. The platform’s algorithm rewards controversial posts by promoting them in a curated feed of personalized content to its 1 billion users, and efforts to remove content that contravenes its guidelines are often criticized as ineffective.
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