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Content warning! This story contains sexually explicit words documented as part of the investigation. Reader discretion is advised.
At around 2:00 pm on April 17, 2026, a TikTok notification landed on this reporter’s screen. A livestream had just started. The host was Happiness, a TikTok influencer with 269,000 followers on his main account and three backup accounts with 85,000, 62,000, and 2,860 followers, respectively.
This reporter clicked to join the live. The session had 30 viewers and 70 likes.
Happiness greeted his audience in Yorùbá, a Nigerian local language. “Ẹ bá mi double tap screen yín,” he instructed. That means “Double-tap your screens,” so TikTok recommends this live to more people.
The likes climbed from 70 to 2,000. The viewers went from 30 to 156, then 310, then 600.
Happiness watched the numbers. He was not impressed. “Mo ma block yín o,” he warned. “I will block anyone who only wants to benefit without contributing.”
Seven women had joined him as speakers. He asked how their day was going. They responded warmly, some referencing what had happened in their mutual WhatsApp group the night before. Everyone laughed.
Then Happiness asked his first question. “Ta ló ti dó toaster ẹ̀ rí lọ́jọ́ tí wọ́n toast ẹ̀?” This translates to mean, “Who has had sex with a man the very same day he asked them out?”
Tife, one of the women, said she had. The views had reached 2.3k by this time.
Before she began, Happiness reminded her of the rules. “Yorùbá ni ko sọ o,” he said. “Kí TikTok má ban account yìí.” This is a warning which translates to “speak only Yorùbá, so my account does not get flagged by TikTok.”
Tife said she understood.
She began. A new man in her estate approached her at 9:00 pm while she was walking alone. He was driving a Lexus. He parked and beckoned her over. They talked. He expressed his feelings, but she told him she would think about it. He asked what she was doing later that night. She said nothing. They kept talking for an hour. Gradually, his right palm landed on her lap. She was wearing a bumshort and spaghetti top. Before she could think, they began making out.
Things were moving too fast, and people were passing by. He stopped and drove toward a quiet part of the estate. They parked in the dark and moved to the back seat.
Bimbo, the co-moderator, cut in. “Sọ bó ṣe ṣẹlẹ̀ gán gán fún wa. Báwo lẹ ṣe ṣeé? Kí lẹ ṣe…” Tell us exactly what happened and how you both did it.
Tife obeyed. She described how he touched her, how she moaned, how everything unfolded. They finished around 11:00 pm, but she was too tired to go home. She went to his house, where they slept till 5:00 in the morning before doing another round.
By the time she ended her story, the comments section had exploded.
“Òbò ti tutù,” a lady typed. Meaning, I am wet. “SVC wà o,” a few wrote. “I am available for a sex video call.”
A man typed that he was in Mowe, in Ogun State, and asked who was available that night. “Hookup” sexual arrangements were organised in the comments, while the narration continued above.
Bimbo had her eyes on the gift counter. These are digital roses, hats or lions that viewers buy with real money and send to creators to show appreciation. TikTok gifts can be converted to cash. And TikTok retains a 50 per cent commission on gifts received by these creators.
She opened her microphone. “Guys ẹ power tap, ẹ tap now,” she said. “Tẹ́ẹ̀ bá le send gifts, ẹ ṣáà le tap. Kí ló dé t’ẹ́yin people yìí ya’hun gan?”
“If you cannot send gifts, you should at least tap your screen. Why are you all so stingy?”
Tife pasted her account details in the comments. People sent her money. “Mo gbádùn ẹ gan,” Happiness said. “Ó try gan, èmi ló jọ,” Bimbo added. “She really tried. I enjoyed her story.”
Then Bimbo turned to Tife again. “Ṣé o ti lọ patí rí, bóyá birthday party t’oko pàjáwìrì fi wáyé?”
“Have you ever had unplanned sex at a party, maybe a birthday party?”
Tife said no.
Bimbo tried again. “Ṣé o ti pe ọkùnrín kó wá dó ẹ mọ́’lé rí?” Have you ever invited a man to come have sex with you at your house?
Tife said not in her house. But she had called a man once and told him she was in the mood. She went to his house in the Ikorodu area of Lagos State. Bimbo asked for details, and another story began.
At one point, Tife slipped into English mid-sentence. “Yorùbá!” Bimbo cautioned. Tife apologised and switched back.
After Tife, three other participants narrated their own encounters. One after the other. The gift counter kept climbing.
The session ended at 4:40 pm. It had run for two hours and forty minutes.
TikTok did not stop it.
Same script, different actors
But this was not a one-off. In Nigeria, a crop of TikTok creators has turned the platform’s livestream feature into an adult-content audio channel. Apart from Happiness, others host explicit sexual storytelling sessions, disguised as “gist” and “adult talk.” They all speak Yorùbá, and because TikTok’s moderation systems appear not to understand what they say, some sessions have been running since 2025.
Between December 2025 and May 2026, DUBAWA joined 20 livestreams featuring five of these creators to monitor their activities.
In a separate session hosted on March 9, 2026, by Old Taker, another influencer with 86k followers, the moderator asked a female narrator, “Ṣé o ti dó pastor ẹ nínú church rìí?” That is, “Have you ever had sex with your pastor inside the church?”
She said yes, and the story went on with the same pattern used by Happiness.
Top five creators and their engagement rate. Credit: DUBAWA/Sunday Awosoro.
Apart from Happiness and Old Taker, there is Yinka TNT, another creator with 117k followers, who hosted a married woman sharing how she had a threesome with her husband and a prostitute.
There are also Kalifiat Odunayo, popularly known as God Mother, Adun of TikTok, and Flora, who have hosted similar shows to the rest.
However, Happiness, Oldtaker and Yinka TNT’s sessions do not usually end when the livestreams do. Participants secretly screen-record and recirculate these stories on their own TikTok accounts, using the hashtag “#okoatiobo” which means #PenisAndVagina.
They also add “Make sure you lower your volume,” or “Don’t open in public,” as captions.
These accounts usually gain higher engagement in thousands of views, likes, and shares than the original livestreams.
These recordings also end up on X, Telegram and private WhatsApp groups, long after the original live has ended, as seen here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
These recordings might be available for children to view because TikTok relies on self-declared birth dates when opening an account. ID verification is requested only when an account is flagged, when users want to unlock restricted features, list products, or reclaim gifts. Globally, over 88 per cent of TikTok users are aged 16-24. In Nigeria, TikTok had at least 37.4 million users aged 18 and above in early 2025. However, the platform does not publish data on its under-18 user population in Nigeria. Likewise, its own advert tools do not track that demography.
Audio, local language, and TikTok’s moderation loopholes
TikTok’s policies are clear. The platform bans use of “sexually explicit language,” which it defines as graphic descriptions of sexual acts, fantasies, or body parts.
On paper, Happiness’ live session should have been dead on arrival. But that was not the case.
TikTok catches violations by reading context, bios, hashtags, captions, and sounds. Its moderation system looks for signals. The problem, however, is that Happiness left none. No incriminating caption. Just a voice, speaking Yorùbá, to an audience that understood every word.
TikTok claims that over 98.2 per cent of its removed content is caught proactively before anyone reports it. Its audio moderation works by matching clips against a bank of previously flagged violations. In other words, it only catches what it has already seen. A new Yorùbá narration, from an account it has never flagged, matches nothing.
Also, TikTok has documented moderation capabilities for English, Arabic, Spanish, and Indonesian. However, for Yorùbá, spoken by an estimated 50 million people globally, there is silence.
Although TikTok claims its content is also reviewed by human experts, there is no information on how many of its human moderators understand Yorùbá. Whether any of them are native speakers. Or whether its AI has ever been trained on the language at all.
A former TikTok moderator, who asked not to be named for fear of victimisation, told DUBAWA that Nigerian content is reviewed from a centralised location in Kenya, where he and colleagues worked.
In his assessment, TikTok’s current moderation infrastructure is inadequate to protect Nigerian users from local-language explicit content. He said TikTok does not invest equally in moderation for Nigerian users as it does for others.
While he confirmed that TikTok has moderators who are native Yorùbá speakers, he said there is pressure on them to meet removal quotas, which affects how thoroughly local-language content is reviewed.
DUBAWA reported five of these accounts as the live sessions went on. After hours of review, TikTok reverted with the same feedback: “no violations found.” We also reported five accounts that reposted screen records and received the same feedback.
Samuel Kalu, an AI and Machine Learning trainer, explains that AI audio moderation works by transcribing audio into text and checking for “bad words and patterns.”
However, “Yorùbá is hard for AI because there isn’t enough data for the system to learn. Since Yorùbá uses tones to change meaning, the AI gets confused and fails to catch explicit slang that native speakers understand easily,” he said.
Before TikTok can fully moderate this type of content, Samuel said it has to gather large amounts of real-world Yorùbá audio and have native speakers tag the problematic parts.
He said this will train the AI to understand context and “foul language,” so it can stop people from bypassing the rules.
On April 15, 2026, DUBAWA presented the findings of this report in an email to Duduzile Mkhize, TikTok’s Outreach and Partnerships Manager.
On Friday, May 15, a month later, we followed up on the email, and Duduzile replied. She noted that the content described seemed harmful. Hence, she requested that we share the accounts responsible so TikTok can monitor and review.
“The content you are describing sounds like it violates our community guidelines,” Duduzile said.
DUBAWA has submitted a long list of these accounts to TikTok and awaits their action.
NITDA unaware of this practice
The National Information Technology Development Agency’s (NITDA) Code of Practice requires social media platforms operating in Nigeria to moderate harmful content for all users, particularly minors.
On May 11, 2026, DUBAWA spoke with Emmanuel Edet, NITDA’s Acting Director of Regulation and Compliance, and five other agency officials via a virtual call.
Emmanuel confirmed that NITDA was unaware of the practice before DUBAWA brought it to their attention.
“If you had not brought it to our attention, we would not have been aware,” he said. “A lot of the issues around those violations only come to our knowledge because people report those violations. We do not have a real-time, all-media monitoring system that can monitor and identify these violations in real time.”
NITDA said that while it expects social media platforms to moderate content in all the local languages spoken in Nigeria, TikTok had previously communicated to the agency its challenge with moderating live content.
“It’s easier to take down content that has been uploaded because you have a window to filter it. But when it comes to live content, it’s a bit difficult.”
This explanation, however, contradicts DUBAWA’s findings, which showed that this content was redistributed by multiple users on TikTok, with none of it removed even after reporting.
‘We prefer collaboration over platform punishment’ – NITDA
On enforcement, Emmanuel said NITDA would rather collaborate with “international technological companies” and social media platforms than punish them with a fine, restrictions or total ban.
He said not because the agency is “handicapped,” but because “it is more beneficial” to work with them to identify and develop technological solutions for these issues.
“We have learned over the years that when you create an environment where enforcement means shutting down or fining, technology always finds a way around that enforcement. And so it’s a cat-and-mouse game. And the rules you create today will no longer be easy to enforce tomorrow.”
Emmanuel further affirmed NITDA’s intolerance for child rights violations. However, regarding platform moderation, he said the agency is still conflicted about how to balance allowing children beneficial access while protecting them from harmful content. He described this as “the tightrope juggling that we are still struggling to do.”
NITDA promised to take up this problem with TikTok if DUBAWA provides the agency with the findings of this story.
For now, Happiness and the other creators on TikTok continue their escapades undisturbed. Their sessions still run in the morning, sometimes into the afternoon and late at night.
Impact
On May 20, five days after submitting a longlist of accounts to TikTok, we found that TikTok had permanently banned two out of the 15 accounts we provided. These included Old Taker and Adun of TikTok.
Before the ban, Old Taker had 89,000 followers and Adun of TikTok had 11,000.
However, while this may seem like progress, there are other concerns which DUBAWA has already raised with TikTok.
One, the screen-recorded sessions of the banned accounts are still all over TikTok. By searching their names, the old sessions that exist on other users’ accounts pop up, as seen in screenshots below.
Second, some of these creators have created backup accounts. For example, Happiness has three active backup accounts with 85,000, 62,000 and 2,860 followers each, as seen here, here and here. Oldtaker also has a backup account with 8,000 followers.
Likewise, since it appears that TikTok’s AI moderation cannot automatically detect sexual content in Yorùbá, the banned creators would still be able to open new accounts and start over.
DUBAWA screen-recorded sessions from some of the accounts. You can access them here.