Kik is a wildly popular chat app. Their website says that 1 in 3 American teenagers use Kik. But something dark is brewing on Kik.
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Sources
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- https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/13/kik-says-its-here-to-stay-following-shutdown-reports/
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- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/business/dealbook/kik-raises-50-million-from-tencent-in-bid-to-become-wechat-of-the-west.html
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- https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with-kin-ec6290a6453
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- https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/03/06/exclusive-the-fbi-took-over-the-online-identity-of-a-pedophile-letting-child-porn-spread-for-18-months/
- https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik
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- https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2021/02/06/bellwood-police-commander-charged-with-possession-of-child-pornography/
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Attribution
Darknet Diaries is created by Jack Rhysider.
Episode artwork by odibagas.
Audio cleanup by Proximity Sound.
Theme music created by Breakmaster Cylinder. Theme song available for listen and download at bandcamp. Or listen to it on Spotify.
Equipment
Recording equipment used this episode was the Shure SM7B, Zoom Podtrak P4, Sony MDR7506 headphones, and Hindenburg audio editor.
Transcript
[START OF RECORDING]
JACK: [MUSIC] Okay, so, this episode has mature content. I don’t recommend listening to this with young ears around or on some kind of speaker where others might hear it because this episode gets into some dark stuff, so listener discretion is advised. Alright, so this episode is about a mobile app called Kik, spelled K-I-K. It was made in 2010 to help mobile users be able to chat with one another easier. See, back then, people who had BlackBerry phones had a hard time chatting with Android users and iPhone users, so some Canadian college kids made Kik to be able to let people chat freely no matter what type of phone you had. Kik was an immediate hit. Just one month after launching they reported to have one million users and it’s been growing rapidly ever since. But something happened in the Kik chat app which sent this app down a dark path.