Musical.ly Was a Hunting Ground
I found out about Musical.ly the way you find out about most things online—someone sent me a screenshot, someone mentioned it in passing, and then I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand how a lip-sync app had turned into what amounted to an open marketplace for child exploitation.
The app itself was harmless enough in theory. Teenagers and kids could record themselves pretending to sing or dance to clips of popular songs, share them, get likes and comments. Like Snapchat mixed with karaoke. It should have been fine. But what actually happened was that little girls—and I mean little, some of them eight or nine years old—figured out pretty quickly that they got the most attention when they showed more skin. And the men on the platform made sure they knew it.
Accounts with usernames like Wickedluver69
would sit in the comments telling these children they looked hot, sexy, beautiful. The girls would film themselves in their underwear, sitting spread-legged on their bedroom floors, camera pointed straight at their bodies. They’d get hundreds of hearts. Grown men would request features—a way to repost the videos to a larger audience—and offer to help them become stars.
The girls would send their videos over direct message, hoping for exposure, not understanding what they were really being used for.
You could see it all publicly. The collections these predators maintained, organized by age, all the youngest girls grouped together. The requests in comments. The grooming happening in real time. It was all there. The app’s founder claimed they were working on safety, but safety
meant almost nothing when the entire mechanic was designed to reward exposure and attention.
Most parents had no idea. Their kid would come home excited about getting featured, about the followers, about being popular. Some of these girls were maybe barely in middle school. They weren’t trying to be exploited—they just wanted likes, wanted to feel seen, wanted the validation that the platform’s algorithm dangled in front of them. That’s what the men banking on were counting on.
It’s one of those things where you wish you could unknow it, where you look at your phone and just feel tired about how easily something designed for fun gets weaponized. The app got sold off eventually, some of the most egregious accounts got removed, but the premise never changed. Neither did human nature.