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- Calling themselves the "Great Londini," a group of masked vigilantes are trawling TikTok to hunt down cyberbullies.
- The TikTok group claims to be able to find out someone's real identity within eight clicks.
- TikTok, however, has suspended and deleted several of the group's accounts.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
A vigilante group on TikTok says it's searching the platform for trolls and airing their identities in short clips to expose them to their parents and employees.
The group goes by the Great Londini, and is represented by a mask with hollow, pitch-black eyes and a gaping, Joker-like smile. The group has a website, Twitter account, and YouTube page, where it posts examples of what it says it's capable of accomplishing. It also has 2.3 million followers on TikTok – the main platform for its exposés.
In one example, the Great Londini outs a man it claims is a lawyer who posted a comment telling a young cop to "eat (his) gun."
"Would you hire a lawyer that made this comment about a police officer? Neither would we. So what should we do? We say – stupid game, stupid prize."
In an interview with the BBC, a man going by the name Leo spoke for the group. He explained that he was simply the "face" of a group of volunteers with cyber-security and military experience who want to be collectively known under a singular name. The group says their collective experience allows them to uncover someone's real identity - whether or not they hide behind an anonymous account name - within seven to eight clicks.
According to the BBC, Leo spoke to the news outlet from a location in the US. He called himself an "anti-troll," and said he was helping TikTok with content moderation by reporting abusive trolls and sending TikTok "every piece of information" the group fishes out.
But TikTok is not a fan of Londini. Leo told the BBC the app deleted nine accounts associated with the Great Londini username. The app also suspended the tenth (and current) account multiple times for online harassment and bullying - claims that the group contests.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider on its content moderation policies. However, the video-sharing app said in a report that it independently removed 62 million videos during the first three months of 2021 for violating its guidelines on user content. According to the platform, this was less than 1% of all the videos uploaded on TikTok.
TikTok also noted in the same report that the US was the biggest market where videos were taken down for user content violations, with a total of 8,540,088 takedowns from January to March this year.