TikTok Influencers Are Selling BodyBuilding Drugs to Teens, Report Finds

TikTok is failing to curb the promotion and sale of dangerous steroid-like drugs that are being marketed towards minors by bodybuilding influencers, according to a new report out Thursday from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

“Ultimately, this is a story of TikTok’s stark failure to govern their own platform and enforce their rules. Urgent action is needed,” Imran Ahmed the CEO and founder of CCDH wrote in the report. “TikTok must start enforcing its own rules prohibiting the promotion and sale of potentially dangerous drugs for profit—and it needs to be much more transparent about how many children and teenagers are routinely exposed to this content through the platform’s algorithms.”

Researchers at the CCDH looked at a series of hashtags promoting the use of “steroid-like drugs,” a catch-all term for anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), peptides and Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs). All three classes of drugs are prohibited; AAS are illegal for sale without a prescription in the US, while peptides and SARMS are illegal to sell as unapproved drugs for human consumption. The CCDH report says these drugs fall foul of TikTok’s own safety guidelines, which “ban the promotion and sale of regulated substances.”

The new report, called “TikTok’s Toxic Trade,” looks at videos with hashtags that promote the use of these drugs, and found that they were viewed by U.S. users up to 587 million times in the last three years, including up to 420 million views from U.S. users aged under 24.

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Callum Hood, a senior researcher at the CCDH, says TikTok does not provide data on how often a video has been viewed by users under the age of 18, so they were unable to estimate how many have been seen by younger teens. One in six American teenagers use the app “almost constantly,” according to a Pew Research survey published last year, and the minimum age for creating a TikTok account is 13.

Many of the videos identified by the CCDH extoll the so-called benefits of steroid-like drugs, promising they will help users build muscles, grow taller and increase their penis size.

In fact, these drugs are known to have dangerous side effects, including increased risk of heart attack and stroke, increased aggression, sexual dysfunction and testicular shrinkage, among others, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

In 2018, an Irish 18-year-old, Luke O’Brien, died after taking the anabolic steroid Stanozolol to increase his performance in school sports. The drug had led to fatal swelling in his brain. And there are dangers for adult bodybuilders too, who face serious physical side-effects from steroids and steroid-like drugs, including enlarged hearts, loss of fertility, cognitive changes, and in some cases, death.

The CCDH found that many of the videos downplayed the risks associated with these drugs, and offered advice clearly aimed at teens, including how to hide drug usage from your parents.

“Just tell your parents they’re vitamins,” one user posted.

One user, @bennythelifter, explicitly encouraged teens to buy SARMS from the European company Biaxol Supplements, via a 10 percent discount link in his bio.

“Teenagers lied about their age just to fight in WW2,” he wrote in a video caption, “but you are too scared to take S4RMs.”

“When you look at how this stuff is marketed, the marketing is all upside,” Hood said, of the claims made by TikTok influencers about the drugs. “There’s no risks, or the risks are minimal and it’s a link to a dodgy website where you can get 10% off. There's no guarantee that you’re getting what you’ve been promised. There’s no guarantee that the advice you’re being given is accurate and people are going into this blind, not knowing what they're getting into and not knowing what they’re buying.”

The new CCDH report identified 35 specific influencers who are profiting from the sale of these prohibited drugs by partnering with drug manufacturers to offer discount codes. Researchers found these accounts alone had almost 1.8 million followers, allowing drug sellers to dramatically boost their audiences.

One these accounts, @Teach_me_roids, offers advice specifically geared towards teenagers (using hashtags like #teenfitness and #teenbodybuilding), saying that if they self-medicate during puberty they can increase their height and penis size. The account also offers a video tutorial on how to “homebrew” anabolic-androgenic steroids using amateur laboratory equipment, and links on where to buy the raw materials.

Websites, like those linked by @Teach_me_roids, often try to skirt the law by describing the drugs they sell as “research chemicals” that are not fit for human consumption. That has not been good enough for the FDA, who have sanctioned companies for selling prohibited products with this disclaimer, telling one company early this year that it was clear their “products are intended to be drugs for human use.”

The CCDH is calling on TikTok to “enforce its own rules prohibiting the promotion of drugs,” including removing content that promotes steroid-like drugs, penalizing users who repeatedly violate the rules, and addressing the links in user bios offering discount codes for drugs sites. They are also asking for greater transparency on the number of users under 18 who are viewing this content.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson for TikTok took issue with the CCDH’s methodology and findings.

“This report, like previous ones by the CCDH, does not distinguish between positive content (i.e. recovery, support) and negative content,” a TikTok spokesperson said. “The hashtag 'steroid', for example, could contain any number of videos related to the topic of steroids, which don't show or promote their usage.”

“Any content that is instructing, selling, or depicting using Selective Androgen Receptor Modulator (SARMs) violates our Community Guidelines and will be removed when detected,” they said.