Auditing Exposure to Harmful Content on TikTok using Multimodal Language Models: A Cross-National, Age-Stratified Study

Abstract:Online video platforms can expose young users to harmful content, but independent audits remain difficult because video annotation is costly and moderation judgments vary across languages. We audit TikTok in France, Italy, and Sweden with sockpuppet accounts representing four age personas (13, 16, 19, 40), collecting 36,971 videos from passive For-You-page scrolling and active sessions that scroll, search for harm keywords, and scroll again. To scale annotation, we validate four multimodal LLMs against native-speaker labels on a 300-video reference set. Gemini 2.5 Flash with eight sampled frames plus text performs best (aggregate kappa = 0.42), at half the per-call cost of native-video upload, and we apply it to a 10% sample for approximately \$50 in total API spend across both modalities. Keyword search returns 35-56% harmful content, a 1.5-7.5x increase over the scrolling baseline in ten of twelve country-age combinations; the spike is temporary and flattens the age differences observed in France and Sweden. Under passive scrolling, Italy has the highest harm rate at every age, with Italian age-19 reaching 48.6%. Overall, MLLM-based auditing offers a scalable approach for cross-national youth-safety audits, while provider safety filters (1.1% refusal rate) under-count the most explicit harms.

20 pages, 16 figures, 14 tables. Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.17583 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.17583v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.17583 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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