TikTok Beheading Video That Went Viral Removed, Company Apologizes
TikTok has removed an explicit beheading video that went viral on the platform, apologizing to those who saw it.
The now-removed video, uploaded by @mayenggo3, duped viewers into thinking it was simply a girl dancing, only to cut to the explicit clip moments later. In the video, a man can be seen being brutally beheaded by a group of men in a bathroom.
In a statement to Newsweek, a spokesperson for TikTok said: "We appreciate the concerted effort by our community to warn about an unconscionably graphic clip from another site that was spliced into a video and brought onto TikTok. The original video was quickly removed, and our systems are proactively detecting and blocking attempted re-uploads of the clip to catch malicious behavior before the content can receive views. We apologize to those in our community, including our moderators, who may have come upon this content."
The video has been present on the internet for two years, but was previously hosted on gore sites, rather than apps popular with children. Reports at the time of its initial discovery in 2019 alleged that the video was of a 19-year-old in Mexico.
This time, online speculation suggested the girl dancing at the start of the video was also the girl in the later video, although the individual appears to be a male.
Heavy.com employed a fluent Spanish speaker to translate the video's speech, and found that the men refer to the victim as "Pillo," which is a male nickname for the names Guadalupe, Lupe or Lupillo. While the men also use the masculine profanity "Puto," further indicating the victim is male.
"The accents and the way they stress some of the words lead me to believe they are from the Guanajuato or Jalisco area," added the translator.
The TikTok video is now unavailable on the app and the platform has since been flooded with videos instead warning against watching it. Many users are also advising that people immediately pause and report any videos they see that begin with the girl dancing.
"I've been scared to get on Tiktok because of this beheading video that's apparently going around," wrote one Twitter user.
"I can't go on TikTok today because I'm terrified of seeing the actual BEHEADING that is circulating on there," added another.
Bristol Live reported the video after being contacted by a mother whose young family friend had watched it. "I only became aware of it when a friend's young daughter was sent it," she said. "The video is deeply disturbing and it needs stopping as it will traumatize children. I couldn't watch it all, it made me feel physically sick."
