A TikTok safety feature trusted by millions of parents is not preventing children from encountering graphic videos that portray rape and torture, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The platform’s “restricted mode” is designed to screen out harmful content, yet apparent loopholes are enabling companies to profit by pushing disturbing AI-generated videos at underage users.

The clips appear to take advantage of weaknesses in TikTok’s content policies, which prohibit “realistic violence” and “sexually suggestive content” but can leave room for animated material to circulate.

Among the firms drawing scrutiny is the start-up Director AI, whose video-making tools have reportedly helped users generate more than 15,000 unsettling clips, many shaped by algorithms to maximise engagement.

One video posted across its network of around 50 accounts has been viewed more than 120 million times. It shows a cartoon doctor using a drill to gouge a patient’s face during a grotesque operation intended to make him resemble Kim Kardashian.

Another shows a tattooed burglar exacting revenge on a wealthy woman who once mocked his poverty, ransacking her mansion. 

Footage cuts to his muscular hand clamping around her wrist while she lets out a bloodcurdling scream.

He is then seen laughing manically as he walks away with the zip of his shorts undone, carrying a holdall of stolen cash and gold bullion, leaving her battered, bruised and weeping.

Last night, after seeing the footage, Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott said: ‘We would never tolerate children being exposed to this content offline, so the same must apply online.

‘Social media companies should not have access to our children until they can prove their platforms are safe. Labour must stop dragging their feet and get children off social media.’

For our investigation, we set up a TikTok account on ‘restricted mode’, with the age set to 14 years old, and watched hours of content about children’s TV programmes.

We put limitations on profanity, firearms and weapons, sexually suggestive content, drugs, violent or threatening imagery, and mature or complex content.

Despite this, the account’s main feed was bombarded with a significant volume of content within each of these categories.

The firm behind the videos is run by former Snapchat director Ben Chiang. Mr Chiang – a married father of one – has openly referred to the output as ‘AI slop’. Earlier this year, he boasted on LinkedIn that the videos have racked up more than 10billion views.

Those who want to keep watching must pay for access via the firm’s companion app, Reel AI, rated on Google Play as suitable for children as young as seven.

It offers up to ten free episodes of each mini-series before charging viewers per episode. One purchased episode shows a mother placing her baby in a bathtub and using a hairdryer to electrocute it.

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Online safety expert and psychotherapist Dr Catherine Knibbs said: ‘This is about creating wealth at the expense of children.

‘You have to be a sincerely disconnected human being to not see the harm that this meticulously curated content can cause.’

Mr Chiang co-founded Director AI last year with two former colleagues. When asked who owned the TikTok accounts that made the videos, Mr Chiang, who sits on the board of a youth homelessness charity, told the MoS: ‘It is inaccurate to characterise Director AI itself as producing and publishing all of the videos made using our tools. 

‘Director AI provides AI video-production tools that creators use to make content. Those creators make their own editorial decisions and choose where to publish their work, including on third-party platforms such as TikTok… They may choose to promote Reel AI, but we do not own their accounts or pay them specifically to promote the app.’ 

Mr Chiang added: ‘Some content created using our tools may contain fictional mature themes, but TikTok and other platforms themselves determine eligibility for and filtering within their Restricted Mode under their own systems and policies.’

Following contact by the MoS, the age rating for Reel AI has been changed ahead of the next update to the app.

A TikTok spokesman insisted the platform’s community guidelines prohibit content promoting or glorifying violence and sexual abuse or exploitation.

They said any videos violating the standards have been taken down. Following contact by the MoS, TikTok removed the videos cited in this report – but all the accounts that made them are still active, and still show other similarly inappropriate material.

A spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that broadcast regulator Ofcom has the Government’s ‘full backing’ to ensure tech companies comply with the Online Safety Act.

‘Those firms have a legal duty to remove illegal content, as well as protecting children from harmful material,’ they said.

Meta buried child-safety risks

Instagram owner Meta failed to publicly disclose damning internal findings exposing ‘serious issues’ putting children at risk on the service, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

A report from December 2022 – buried in court documents provided as part of a deposition by Sir Nick Clegg in the case brought by 29 US states against Meta – contained ‘high-risk findings’ over child safety. 

It revealed that on one sampled day, around 1.4million accounts that Instagram had itself flagged as potential child-safety risks were recommended to teenagers.

On another, 924,000 potential ‘violators’ were shown the account of at least one unconnected teenager. 

These were unverified adult accounts that had either received at least one child sexual exploitation violation in the previous 90 days or been flagged by Meta’s automated system as potentially posing a risk of inappropriate interactions with children.

Sir Nick, who was Meta’s then president of global affairs, said he forwarded the audit of Instagram’s youth safeguards to Meta’s legal team but did not know what action was taken.

Rain fell in Slough last week, but the brief downpour did little to change the picture for a town that, like much of southern England, has endured a month of intense heat under a hosepipe ban.

Across the area, lawns and public parks are still scorched and straw-coloured, while children’s paddling pools remain packed away in garages rather than filled for summer afternoons.

Slough is formally classed as a “water-stressed” area, a designation used where demand for water is already close to — and in some cases greater than — the supply available, even in normal conditions.

After repeated heatwaves, the strain has deepened. Thames Water’s reservoirs are currently 74 per cent full, well below the 87 per cent capacity typically expected at this point in the year.

Urging customers to conserve supplies, Thames Water said: “Small changes, such as taking shorter showers, turning off taps and avoiding non-essential water use outdoors, all help to reduce pressure on our network.”

But not everyone is mucking in. When local residents look up at the cooling towers on the Slough Trading Estate, they see a different world: one where there seems to be no shortage of water whatsoever.

That’s because Slough’s commercial premises are not subject to the hosepipe and sprinkler ban. Indeed, they can use as much water as they like.

And that’s bad news for Thames Water’s private customers because Slough’s industrial zone has become a hub of Britain’s burgeoning data centre industry, with 32 of them housed within the town. They consume water as greedily as camels at an oasis.

Frustratingly, there is no publicly available data that reveals exactly how much water each data centre uses but, according to the trade body TechUK, one in 25 of them uses more than 100,000 cubic metres of water every year. And 14 per cent of them are using between 10,000 and 100,000 cubic metres.

On closer inspection, however, it only seems to have surveyed 72 of the 500-plus data centres in Britain. How much water is used by the other 400-odd is anyone’s guess.

To put this in context, 100,000 cubic metres equates to the amount of water consumed by 3,000 households, the volume required to fill 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools and is ten times as much as is used collectively by England’s 2,200 golf courses.

Unfortunately, a data centre’s water consumption goes up massively during the hot summer weather – at precisely the time water is most likely to be in short supply. 

US research suggests a data centre can consume 25 times as much water on a summer day as on a winter one.

They require large amounts of water because they are voracious consumers of energy: Slough’s data centres are estimated to gobble up 65 per cent of all the electricity consumed in the town.

Such huge energy consumption generates vast quantities of waste heat, which has to be dissipated somehow.

While around half of all data centres use air cooling, the larger ones tend to use water cooling systems, which rely on evaporation to bring down the temperature.

Despite the data centres’ vast appetite for water, however, local residents claim that they can still feel the heat from the bases.

According to a Cambridge University study published earlier this year, a large data centre is theoretically capable of raising temperatures in its vicinity to the tune of 2C.

That said, because the effect is so heavily localised, there is little evidence to suggest that the town of Slough as a whole is suffering from the heat more than other places nearby. 

On August 13, when the village of Wisley, 20 miles away in Surrey, recorded the year’s maximum temperature of 38.1C, Slough’s weather station – which lies half a mile from the cluster of data centres – peaked at a slightly more bearable 37.6C.

But the data centres’ thirst is increasing exponentially as the tech giants’ artificial intelligence (AI) models become ever more complex.

In 2023, a University of California study calculated that a data centre will consume the equivalent of a half-litre bottle of water for every 10 to 15 tasks it is asked to perform. 

As a large data centre will undertake many millions of such tasks a day, that adds up to a big strain on the water supply.

Yet the dizzying increase in the power of AI models suggests that this estimate may be already out of date.

Their demand for electricity is already increasing remarkably. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that Meta’s AI model Llama 3, introduced in July 2024, consumed as much electricity to perform a task as simple as producing a travel itinerary for Istanbul as it takes to ride an e-bike six feet.

Months later, however, an improved version was using as much electricity as it takes to propel the same bike 400 feet.

With the increase in power consumption comes a proportional increase in water usage. Google, for example, reported that its water consumption increased by 34 per cent in 2025 alone. In evidence to the House of

Commons Environmental Audit Committee last month, Water UK – the trade body for the water industry – warned that the government’s policy of trebling the number of data centres in Britain by 2030 has failed to take account of the amount of water they consume.

It stated: ‘Despite the extraordinary growth envisaged and desired, the government has all but forgotten that most data centres require water to cool their systems. The government’s forecasts for England’s future water needs also explicitly exclude data centres.’

Water UK also pointed out that water scarcity is already compromising the government’s house-building plans and preventing other sorts of businesses from expanding. ‘The situation is so bad that, solely due to a lack of water, the Environment Agency objected to a cancer hospital being built near Cambridge,’ it added.

Yet data centres can sidestep restrictions put on other forms of development because, two years ago, the government designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, meaning that they can be rushed through the planning system.

Water UK’s words are echoed in a report by the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance, which draws its members from government, tech companies, academia and the non-profit sector.

It describes the refusal to take water usage into account as ‘a systemic planning failure, indicating a disconnect between the nation’s digital economy growth ambitions and its fundamental resource management strategies’.

In other words, the government has geared its growth strategy so much around water-hungry data centres that it risks reducing the rest of the economy to a constant state of thirst.

Not only that, data centres are sucking ever more power from an already over-stretched electricity grid.

In 2024, they are estimated to have drawn 2,400 gigawatt-hours of energy, two per cent of Britain’s total energy consumption.

Last month, Energy Minister Lord Hunt, in answer to a question in the House of Lords, revealed that this figure had already grown to 2.5 per cent. And things will only get worse. 

In March, North Lincolnshire Council granted planning permission for what will be Britain’s largest data centre yet: Elsham Tech Park, on a 435-acre site near Scunthorpe.

The government has designated North Lincolnshire as a growth area for data centres partly because of a large number of wind and solar farms in the area, but their energy supply is not reliable enough for a data centre.

And it has the potential to draw power of one gigawatt, which represents about three per cent of Britain’s average power demand.

While the plans include a gas power station on site, this would produce a maximum of 50 megawatts – 5 per cent of what the data centre is projected to consume.

So the Elsham plan also includes provision for an astonishing 650 back-up diesel generators, each one of them producing 2.5 megawatts, or as much power as 25 diesel cars. 

While the rest of us are told we might be subjected to surge pricing or rationing on cloudy, windless days, Elsham data centre will be able to keep going by spewing out vast quantities of diesel fumes.

As diesel is a particularly dirty form of fossil-fuel powered generation, a single data centre will blow a huge hole in former Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s dream of a near carbon-free electricity grid by 2030.

Then there’s the small matter of water consumption. The planning application for Elsham includes sections on the welfare of bats and breeding birds, as well as minutiae such as making provision for staff to be able to cycle to work, but it hardly addresses the issue of water use at all.

This is because the developers behind the tech park, Greystoke Land, say they will use a ‘closed loop’ cooling system which keeps on circulating water without any need regularly to top it up.

It’s a system that is becoming increasingly popular in data centres around the world and most of the relevant bodies appear to agree that it works. 

According to Water UK, cooling systems of this sort can reduce water consumption to less than one per cent of other data centres. 

And North Lincolnshire Council says that it accepts the plant’s water use will be ‘minimal’. But use of the closed loop system comes at a hefty price: it makes a data centre even more power-hungry.

When former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer revealed his vision of the UK becoming a world powerhouse in AI last January, he seemed to take no account of the impact of data centres on our water and energy supplies.

He also rode roughshod over the views of people who might one day find such a centre on their doorstep. 

In the same month, planning permission was granted for a 20-acre data centre on Green Belt land next to Mimms service station on the M25 – another water-stressed area.

Housebuilders and other developers have been kept off the land for 70 years on environmental grounds but now it appears that, if you want to build a data centre, it is fine to eat into the increasingly scarce precious fragments of countryside left around London.

Data centres may appear to be shining beacons of a modern, clean economy but, in reality, they are energy, water and land-hungry monsters – far more so than the cotton mills which symbolised the industrial revolution.

As so little serious thought has been put into how they can be accommodated, they threaten to overload our infrastructure.

Britain is a country that has not only failed to build a single reservoir in 30 years but closed down its coal-fired power stations prematurely as part of the mad dash to net zero.

As a result, we are suffering endless water shortages (the current hosepipe ban was introduced despite a wet winter).

And the electricity grid is struggling to cope, running into serious problems in June’s heatwave, which apart from increasing demand for electricity to run air conditioning units and fans, made power stations less efficient and transmission wires less effective.

It is one thing to promise that Britain will become an AI powerhouse, quite another to tell people that they can’t water their lawn, or even have a bath or a long shower because the data centre down the road needs the water.

In the government’s headlong rush to make us one of the world’s AI superpowers, something is going to have to give.

Usha Vance responded with warmth and restraint after Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed took aim at JD Vance and appeared to question whether the vice president’s family would have embraced the Second Lady.

The exchange began after Vance referenced his late maternal grandfather, James “Papaw” Vance, while criticizing the progressive candidate. El-Sayed fired back online, writing: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…”

Asked about the remark during an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” Second Lady Usha Vance chose not to escalate the political jab, instead offering a composed and personal answer.

“I have to admit, I kind of laughed,” she said. “Because yes, I never met JD’s Mamaw and Papaw. But I do know and love the children that they raised, his mom, his aunt and uncle. And they have never been anything but incredibly loving.”

Usha also emphasized that JD Vance’s maternal aunt, Lori Meibers, shares a particularly close bond with her, underscoring the affection she says she has experienced within the vice president’s family.

‘His aunt is like a second mother to me and so I have to think that if they raised children like that, they would have been loving as well. And I would have really, really, really loved to have met them.’

El-Sayed, who is running for Senate in Michigan, set off the controversy on Saturday after appearing to make a pointed reference to the second lady’s Indian heritage while firing back at Vance.

The remark immediately ignited accusations that El-Sayed had crossed a line by targeting a politician’s spouse – with critics branding him a ‘racist creep’ and questioning how he would treat women if elected to Congress.

The extraordinary exchange began after Vance attacked El-Sayed over his previously stated views about Sharia law during a rally in Ohio.

Vance invoked his late maternal grandfather, James ‘Papaw’ Vance, while arguing that El-Sayed’s views would have been completely alien to the world in which his grandfather lived.

El-Sayed responded by bringing Usha Vance into the fight.

‘So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…’ he wrote on X.

The comment appeared to suggest that Vance’s Indian-American wife might have faced hostility from his white Midwestern grandfather – an implication that quickly prompted outrage from conservatives and other critics.

The escalating row comes at a crucial moment for El-Sayed, who is running against Republican former congressman Mike Rogers in what has become a fiercely contested Michigan Senate race.

And critics quickly sought to portray the Usha Vance post as something more serious than an ill-judged social-media barb.

Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was raised in California and met her future husband while the pair attended Yale Law School.

The couple married in 2014 and have since had four children, with the second lady giving birth to their youngest child last month.

She has generally maintained a substantially lower political profile than her husband despite becoming one of the most recognizable spouses in Washington following Vance’s elevation to the vice presidency.

The firestorm intensified because Usha Vance was not the only woman connected to the Trump administration whom El-Sayed targeted online Saturday.

Earlier the same day, he directed another post at Natalie Harp, an aide to President Donald Trump who has herself become the subject of intense political and online scrutiny.

Trump had blasted El-Sayed during a rally over his association with socialist streamer Hasan Piker, who generated outrage with his past declaration that ‘America deserved 9/11.’

El-Sayed responded to the president’s attack by addressing Harp directly.

‘Natalie, I think he’s had a little too much iPad for the week. He needs his rest,’ El-Sayed wrote.

GOP strategist Matt Whitlock posted screenshots of El-Sayed’s remarks about both women and argued they demonstrated a wider problem with his candidacy.

‘This is what I’m talking about,’ Whitlock wrote.

‘Just a bad campaign, bad candidate, bad instincts. Sitting at home on a Saturday morning tweeting bad takes that any normal campaign would shut down.’

Tudor Dixon, the former Republican candidate for Michigan governor, went further, arguing that the posts should raise questions about how El-Sayed would behave toward women working alongside him on Capitol Hill.

‘He goes after Usha. He goes after Natalie [Harp]. This coward picks on women who are not in his fight,’ Dixon said.

‘Imagine how he would treat female staffers in the halls of Congress.’

The Daily Mail has contacted the El-Sayed campaign for comment.

Right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has returned to the United Kingdom after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement publicly identified him as an “illegal alien.”

Yiannopoulos, a former chief of staff to Kanye West and onetime editor at the far-right outlet Breitbart, was deported from the United States on Friday, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Angelina Vicknair confirmed to the Daily Mail.

The controversial media figure was taken into custody Thursday at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in Louisiana after stepping off a flight, then placed in a holding facility.

ICE later released a detention photo of Yiannopoulos, showing him with a gaunt expression and visible bags under his eyes.

By the following day, he had been sent back to the UK. TMZ reported that Yiannopoulos arrived Saturday morning Pacific time, which was Saturday evening in the UK.

DHS said he legally entered the country in 2019 and ‘chose to overstay his welcome,’ violating immigration laws. 

Yiannopoulos, who has been a vocal supporter of mass deportation, was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on July 22 and failed to show up for his immigration hearing, according to DHS.

‘Being in detention is a choice’ the department added, encouraging undocumented migrants to self-deport for $3,000 and a free flight to their nation of origin.

The announcement of his arrest sparked chatter online among prominent right-wing figures. Laura Loomer took credit for his arrest in a phone call with the New York Times. 

‘I have been saying this should happen for a long time and now it did,’ she told the publication, adding that Yiannopoulos had been ‘Loomered!’

Loomer and Yiannopoulos were once allies but had a public falling out. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X that Yiannopoulos worked on Loomer’s former political campaigns.

‘Milo Yiannopoulos is in ICE custody after I exposed his illegal alien lifestyle. Marjorie Traitor Greene hired Milo to work as her “intern” where he produced her podcast, wrote her book and lived at her house in Rome, Georgia before she sold it,’ Loomer claimed on X. 

Greene denied Yiannopoulos lived with her, calling Loomer a ‘vile liar.’ 

Other right-wingers have celebrated Yiannopoulos’ deportation, with Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, writing ‘Good riddance’ on X. 

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Since his rise to fame as a political commentator, Yiannopoulos has been an advocate of immigration restriction and mass deportations.

He said in 2017 that he was in America on an O-1 nonimmigrant visa, which is granted to aliens with an ‘extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics,’ according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

O-1 visas require sponsorship by an ‘agent’ or employer and can also be given to individuals of ‘extraordinary achievement’ in movies and TV.

Yiannopoulos has a longstanding association with West and acted as director of political operations on his 2024 US presidential campaign.

In 2022, during his time as West’s political honcho, he helped arrange the rapper’s explosively controversial Mar-a-Lago summit with Donald Trump and the self-described ‘white identitarian’ streaming star Nick Fuentes.

Yiannopoulos has since dramatically fallen out with Fuentes, whom he now relentlessly derides on X.

 In 2017, he exchanged vows in Hawaii with a black man whom he publicly referred to only as ‘John,’ otherwise carefully concealing his identity.

Yiannopoulos has characterized himself as ‘ex-gay’ since 2021, and has commenced divorce proceedings with his husband.

During Trump’s second term, Yiannopoulos has been vocal in urging ICE to step up its expulsion of immigrants who are in the US illegally.

‘There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering,’ he declared in a post on X last June. ‘It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.’

Three days later, he wrote: ‘California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally.’

The Daily Mail attempted to contact Yiannopoulos on Friday for comment.