2023-06-28 18:27:38
The star application among teenagers Yubo is in turmoil. The independent media They ate carried out a survey in which it reveals that adolescents, especially girls, are regularly trapped by pedocriminals with “nude” blackmail.
“Send your ass, you have 2 minutes. Otherwise I post everywhere. »@AmbrineBdida investigated for several weeks, on a traffic of videos of naked teenagers. Victims are often trapped on Yubo, a kind of Tinder for teenagers.
Check out the survey on… pic.twitter.com/uXraYeXKTW
— Vakita (@vakitamedia) June 27, 2023
Very popular in the United States and much less so in France, Yubo was created in 2015 by three French engineering students. It is a social network intended for friendly meetings for teenagers from 12 to 17 years old. Half-Tinder half-Snapchat, “the ultimate goal of Yubo is to make groups of friends”, explained Sacha Lazimi, one of the three creators, on the radio Movementin 2019.
Unlike Tinder, the app doesn’t display users’ geolocations, so real-life encounters are rare, but that doesn’t stop teens from making friends, which is Yubo’s main goal. The app’s founders created it after “seeing Gen Z behavior sharing on Instagram or Facebook their Snapchat handle in order to make new friends”.
When registering, users enter their first name, age and photo, then the platform then offers discussion groups according to their age and interests. This social network works with discussion groups of about ten people who exchange with each other around various and varied subjects.
In addition to exchanging by text as in a WhatsApp group, users can communicate by live audio or live video. Messaging also allows you to meet in private, hence the nickname “Tinder for teens”, for this application which today claims more than 60 million users, most of them in the United States.
Hunting ground for child criminals?
Unlike TikTok or Instagram which are “revolved around content, performance and individualistic behavior (…) Yubo attaches great importance to not leaving room for individualism”, indicated Sacha Lazimi at small diary in 2020. On the contrary, Yubo puts aside the social marker that is the “like” to leave room for the discovery of personalities and open-mindedness, for this generation which has a “significant feeling of loneliness”, according to its creators.
No likes, no followers, meeting people virtually and making friends… Yubo’s approach is different from the most famous social networks, but moderation remains difficult to manage. Despite the artificial intelligence put in place to moderate content, tools to report inappropriate content and human moderators, many “nudes” circulate on the application.
In 2019, an article from Point revealed many humiliating practices between young people from the same high school on the application. Sharing of “nudes”, trials between teenagers to justify their acts, degrading pledges… everything goes and it is difficult for the moderators to deal with it despite the means put in place.
Recently, it was the independent media Vakita who made revelations about the blackmailing of “nudes”. The investigation shows that pedophiles use Yubo as a hunting ground to get in touch with teenage girls, phish them by asking them for intimate photos or videos of them before blackmailing them: sending more nudes or “swinging” those previously sent over the Internet.
Yubo says he has taken the measure of the phenomenon
In addition to humiliating young girls, phishers resell the content on the encrypted messaging application Telegram, via “VIP channels” where thousands of pedophiles buy this child pornography content.
Following these disclosures, Yubo released a statement to indicate that it has been taking the safety and well-being of its users very seriously for several months: “Since these actions were reported to us, it has been over a year, our teams carried out investigations which made it possible to permanently ban the users involved. »
The social network reminds its users of the importance of never sharing “personal information or sensitive content with people you don’t know well” and invites them to report any suspicious or inappropriate behavior.
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