A 16-year-old girl was rescued in Kentucky after using a hand gesture described on the social media app TikTok to signal to motorists that she was in trouble. The signal – turning the palm outwards and closing the fingers around a tucked thumb – has been demonstrated by users on TikTok and by non-profit organisations like the Canadian Women’s Foundation as a way for a person being abused to tell someone they are in trouble without alerting the abuser. ‘That hand gesture was everything,’ Gilbert Acciardo from the Laurel county sheriff’s office said. ‘Had that not been been transmitted by the young lady, had there not been someone out there that knew how to interpret what she was doing, then who knows? We might not have had a good resolution on this’
