TikTok: Criminal Domain

By Sergio Aguayo y Gerardo Arroyo Beristain

English translation by Yenni Castro (Valestra Editorial)

TikTok is more than just dance trends, viral challenges, or light humor. In Mexico, cartels use it to recruit hitmen and lure young girls into prostitution rings. Research conducted at the Seminar on Violence and Peace at El Colegio de México shows that organized crime moves with ease in the digital ecosystem.

In April 2025, in partnership with the Civic A.I Lab at Northeastern University in Boston, we published the study New Frontiers in Digital Recruitment. Recruitment strategies used on TikTok by organized crime. We organizedthe study based on two rigorous methodological pillars. First, a digital ethnography that allowed us to identify recurring hashtags, songs, and symbols used by accounts apparently related to some type of criminal activity. Then, a quantitative analysis with which we measured interactions and behavioral patterns. We confirmed our intuition: almost half of the observed profiles were used for explicit recruitment, and another 30% functioned as criminal propaganda.

We identified accounts offering fake jobs with the promise of payment and lodging; profiles inviting to "work for the maña" (maña: a colloquial way of referring to the cartels); videos specifically targeting migrants, single mothers, teenagers, and children. The New Generation Jalisco Cartel (CJNG) is undoubtedly the one that most exploits this platform. However, we also detected systemic activity from the Sinaloa Cartel (CDS) and the Northeast Cartel (CDN), among others.

The details seem insignificant, but they are profoundly revealing. A fighting rooster emojiused to refer to Nemesio Oseguera, a.k.a. El Mencho, leader of the CJNG; a pizza emoji to talk about the "Chapizza" faction of the CDS; and narcocorridos transformed into hymns of initiation and identity. Each symbol takes us to a parallel world in which violence is the key to belonging, succeeding, becoming a man, becoming a modern woman, or finding non-existent affection.

What is new is not the violent content (that has been around for decades in songs, movies, and newscasts), but the way it is packaged in brief, attractive, accessible formats, drenched in the codes of youth digital culture. The cartels have understood that with teenagers looking for their way in life, a viral challenge is more effective than a preachy lecture. Crime slides down a slippery slope: they open and close accounts, change codes, multiply videos with dizzying speed, defying any kind of current regulation. We understood that to understand them, we had to start with the fact that the digital field is in perpetual reinvention.

The study on TikTok had a profound media impact in Mexico and attracted the attention of the community of specialists in other countries. And with good reason. While the Mexican federal apparatus had just announced that it had detected 39 accounts on various platforms, the Seminar had identified 100 accounts on TikTok alone. 

As the Seminar does research to contain the violent and give tools to the peaceful, we came to the old and perennial question: what to do? The initial impulse was to turn our attention to the major technological companies. In them, we find a very worrying pattern of laxity, a laissez faire, laissez passer that points towards a policy that has profit as its background. Recommendation algorithms are designed to maximize retention and clicks, which amplifies the reach of these contents, even when they violate terms of use.

 On the other hand, researching these dynamics imposes an accelerated pace. As the first study was being disseminated, we were already exploring where to focus our research with the support of the Ford Foundation's Global Initiative on Polarization.

One of the first steps was to expand partnerships with other institutions. In addition to the United States, we have initiated strategic alliances with Latin American and European institutions. Among the latter are the initial agreements with María Luengo of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, who coordinates the European network of specialists DepolarisingEU, the agreement with the Institute for Integrated Transitions directed by Mark Freeman from Barcelona, and the project headed by Rafael Prieto-Curiel at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna.

This brings us to the second part of the research on TikTok. In October 2025, a delegation from the Seminar on Violence and Peace and Asociación Civil Diálogos from Guatemala will work with counterparts at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. We will take the opportunity to publicly present the second phase of the research on organized crime's use of TikTok.

One clarification is necessary. We do not wish to demonize platforms that can also be spaces for creativity, humor, and education. But it would be naive to ignore that they have become one of the main tools available to globalized crime. And in it, we find a systematic process of recruitment of our youth. Essentially, we are examining the narratives of success and belonging that are circulating among the new generations.

Let's face it. Organized crime offers what the State often fails to guarantee: belonging, recognition, and a sense of future. As long as we do not have credible alternatives, a TikTok video will continue to be more persuasive than any official discourse.

Hence, the problem cannot be reduced to cybersecurity or cyber policing. What is at stake is a cultural dispute over youth. We need public policies that speak their language, community projects that offer identity, and spaces where being part of something does not involve executing someone with an AK-47 or R-15. There is an urgent need for pedagogical work in schools and families: to teach them to recognize the risks of this "normalization" of criminal life disguised as entertainment.

Punitive measures are not enough; we need political imagination, cultural sensitivity, and, above all, real alternatives for young people who today, from the solitude of a screen, receive an invitation to join "the business". The dispute for youth won’t be won with bullets or prohibitions, but with life projects that compete with the criminal narrative.

^{This article is based on a research that can be read in full in English here, and in Spanish, here.}

About the authors

Sergio Aguayo coordinates and Gerardo Arroyo is an analyst for the Seminar on Violence and Peace at El Colegio de México.

Sergio Aguayo has been a full-time professor at the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México since 1977. Since 2014 he coordinates the Seminar on Violence and Peace. He has also been affiliated with the Harvard School of Public Health since 2014. He has written dozens of books and academic articles. He publishes a weekly column in Reforma, which is republished in 10 other newspapers.

Gerardo Arroyo Beristain is a political scientist and political communication consultant. Being a professor at UNAM, he has worked on campaigns, digital strategies, and projects on democracy, violence and human rights, linking academia, communication, and public action.

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