It’s bad enough that Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, posted about engaging in crude sexual acts in public toilets and having phone sex in Afghanistan on a cellphone network likely compromised by the Taliban — and that his wife found sexually explicit messages he had exchanged with multiple other females.
What is more troubling is that since 2016 Platner has had an account on Kik, a messaging app that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), a D.C.-based child advocacy nonprofit, has called “one of the most notorious apps for predatory adults to target young children.” Concerns about the app were public knowledge when he joined, and those warnings steadily mounted over ensuing years, raising new questions about the judgment of a candidate already facing so many. There is no evidence that Platner used the app to communicate with underage girls. (I reached out to Platner’s campaign to ask what he has used the app for but have not received a response.)
Kik is one of the top 10 apps used by teens in America, according to Search Logistics, a London-based search engine optimization agency. It estimates that more than one-third of American teens use Kik (slightly less than the 40 percent Kik claimed back in 2016) and that 70 percent of users are in the 13 to 24 age bracket. But a 2023 NCOSE report cautioned, “Kik is not an app designed for teenagers, but for adults to access teenagers.” Kik has not required users to verify age (except in Britain, where it is mandated by law) or a phone number, valid email or any other identifiable information to initiate direct messages with strangers. For this reason, NCOSE has called the app a “predator’s paradise” for “grooming kids and sharing images of their abuse.”
In 2023, the center set up a fake teen account on Kik for a girl named “Jenny” and reported that within hours “she was contacted by not one, not two, but dozens of adult men” who knew the user was purportedly a minor but still “sent her pornography and graphic messages demanding she send nude images of herself.” “Jenny” was added, without giving consent, to a “family role playing” group chat where members connected to play “stepdaughter” and “stepdad.” Adult users targeting Jenny on Kik engaged in “the most aggressive predatory behavior we have encountered” on any social media app, the NCOSE researchers reported.
According to NCOSE, a report analyzing U.S. federal criminal cases involving child sexual abuse material found that between 2014 and 2020, more than 2,000 minors were victimized on the app. The BBC reported that Kik was a factor in more than 1,100 child sexual abuse investigations in Britain between 2013 and 2018. According to a 2017 investigation by Forbes, Kik had hundreds of groups “dedicated to trading child abuse material, including images and videos of minors aged between three and 12 ‘engaged in sexual acts with adults.’” NCOSE reported that Kik had “no filters to allow children to avoid seeing explicit imagery when searching innocuous tags.” For all these reasons, the center included Kik on its 2023 “Dirty Dozen” list of companies profiting off and enabling sexual abuse.
I asked Lily Moric of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation whether Kik had made any substantial changes to protect children since the center’s 2023 report. She told me that in 2023 and 2024, the app announced changes that “at the time looked really promising.” For example, she noted, “they said they made it an 18-plus platform, which is good.” But, she said, “they do not require any age verification. That gives them a free path to not have any parental controls … because they’re basically saying, ‘Well, why would we have parental controls? It’s for 18 plus.’”
“They said they were requiring a valid email address,” she continued, “but interestingly enough, when I tested the other day creating an account, I did enter my email address, but it didn’t actually require me to verify it.” She added, “We still have lots of reports of minors encountering inappropriate content on there, of them being groomed to send child sexual abuse material.”
In recent days, NCOSE reported that a staff member was able to create a fake account with the username “Im12BeNice” and immediately began to receive suggestive and sexual messages. The first said, “just hopped out of the shower, drying off <3.” Then: “lets do a live call masturbating.” After that came a stream of nude photos. NCOSE said its researchers were not required to verify their ages or email addresses. “This is all part of their ‘anonymity’ that they are proud to tout,” Moric wrote. “But the unfortunate truth is, anonymous apps like Kik are hotspots for people looking to groom children.”
Little wonder that in August last year, Nevada’s Democratic attorney general, Aaron D. Ford, filed a civil lawsuit accusing Kik and its parent company, MediaLab, of endangering the state’s youth — alleging that Kik was “a haven for child predators” and citing cases in which teen children were “groomed, abducted, and even murdered by predators on Kik.” Ford argued that the “Kik product lacks adequate, feasible safety features, e.g., proper parental controls, verification of user age, proper content moderation, safeguards preventing minors from being contacted by predators,” and that Kik’s owners did “nothing to address the harms to children that were rampant on the Kik platform.” As a result, Ford’s complaint declares, “at present, Kik remains one of the most severe threats to minors currently in operation.” (After a motion to dismiss the case was granted in part and denied in part on Feb. 11, the attorney general and Kik agreed to a stay to pursue settlement talks, according to the attorney general’s office.)
I reached out to MediaLab for comment and requested any public response to these allegations, but they did not respond. In the community standards statement on its website, Kik states that the app “is only for people 18 years and older” and adds “it’s important to note that we take this age requirement very seriously, and any violation or suspected violation will result in your account being banned.” It also proclaims “zero tolerance for any content encouraging, promoting, or featuring the exploitation of children.” The experience of the NCOSE researchers suggests otherwise.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Platner joined Kik in 2016 (using the handle “phustle0331”). That year the New York Times published an exposé describing the app’s popularity among sexual predators. The Times reported that the app went “further than most widely used apps in shielding its users from view, often making it hard for investigators to know who is using it, or how.” His Kik account is still active as of this writing. (The Journal reported that according to his campaign, Platner had “long deleted the app from his phone but hadn’t deactivated his account.”)
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) asked in a CNN interview on Tuesday: ”What kind of a creeper has been a decade on a platform like Kik?” Good question.
There have been numerous cases of sex predators in Maine using Kik to target children and trade in child pornography. In June 2025, a Maine man was sentenced to 60 years in prison and supervised release for life for producing videos of children being sexually abused and distributing them on Kik. In September, a Maine man pleaded guilty to obtaining child sexual abuse material on Kik, where he had expressed sexual interest in children 6 to 12 years old. And in February 2023, another Maine resident who admitted to sharing material depicting child sex abuse on the app was sentenced to 13 years after he propositioned an undercover FBI agent posing as a minor.
Predators on Kik pose a direct threat to the children of the very Maine voters Platner seeks to represent in the U.S. Senate. Mainers have a right to know why Platner was on the same app as these convicted pedophiles.
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