Tiktok accounts publish short fictional videos where children like Estelle Mouzin or little Grégory recount their own disappearance. Families denounce “odious and disturbing” videos.
Gregory VilleminEstelle Mouzin or even Maddie McCann… On TikTok, some accounts rack up tens of thousands of subscribers by posting fictional videos of dead people, including missing children, as reported The Parisian. Thanks to the development of artificial intelligence tools, the authors create short stories where the victims tell, facing the camera, “their story”, with a voice that is also automatically generated.
All this is obviously only a morbid staging but which is very successful on social networks. The video on Estelle Mouzin thus accumulates nearly a million views on the TikTok account of its author.
“An absolute lack of humanity”
But these videos are obviously not to the taste of the families of the victims, revolted by these contents. “I don’t want to comment on this kind of video, if you can call it a video, because it would be giving credit to something that only inspires contempt and disgust” replies Estelle’s father to BFMTV Mouzin, who disappeared on January 9, 2003 in Guermantes, in Seine-et-Marne, and whose murder Michel Fourniret admitted
“Not respecting children who died in terrible circumstances and inflicting these videos on parents, families, loved ones is an absolute lack of humanity,” he continues.
His lawyer, Me Didier Seban, who is also the lawyer for the parents of Ludovic Janvier, a 6-year-old boy who has been missing since 1983, will contact the platforms to ask them to withdraw these “odious and disturbing” videos. in the name of respect for the dignity due to the dead.
Contacted by Tech&Co, only one account among those who started this macabre collection of videos responded to the requests, without directly mentioning the case of the various facts.
What rules for Tiktok?
“I created this account simply because I wanted to test the power of AI” he writes. “I don’t focus specifically on deceased people, I try to find atypical stories, stories that have marked France with emblematic characters”. Relaunched once again on the issue of missing children, the tiktokeur concerned is no longer answered questions.
Contacted by Tech&Co, Tiktok had not yet responded. The social network unveiled on Tuesday a new version of its community rules to prohibit the publication of content created by artificial intelligence.
Tiktok, however, makes an exception for “public figures with a significant public role”, such as “a politician, business leader (or) celebrity”. In this case, they can still be published unless “the content is used for promotional purposes or violates any other policy”, in particular with regard to hate speech, sexual content or harassment.
