TikTok has always been evil
Kaylee McGhee White
Even if TikTok were not directly tied to the Chinese Communist Party, it’d continue to be an object of concern. The social media app is horribly toxic and has contributed to addiction, increased rates of depression, and even sociogenic illnesses among children and young adults.
It should come as no surprise that TikTok’s effects are so perverse, considering its content. Users are regularly exposed to sexual, racist, and violent videos on the app, as a new report from Asia Grace revealed this week.
In the report, Grace said she created a TikTok account recently, posing as a 14-year-old boy in order to discover what she would be exposed to as a male teenager in America who used the app passively. The results were troubling. Grace said the algorithm TikTok presented to her included videos of men verbally degrading women’s appearances. One video that popped up on Grace’s feed was titled “Calling my girlfriend the ‘B’ word for her reaction.” Another clip featuring social media personality Andrew Tate, who has described himself as a proud misogynist, included the caption, “Do women like getting murdered?”
Grace also encountered videos in which young men mocked Asian accents and joked about killing orphans and hanging black people, according to the report.
This is the kind of content America’s children are being inundated with every single day on TikTok. More than 67% of teenagers ages 13 to 17 use TikTok regularly, according to the Pew Research Center, with 16% saying they use it constantly.
Of course, TikTok isn’t the only social media platform negatively affecting children. But it is certainly the most popular platform among this demographic, and therefore, it needs to be taken seriously.
The government certainly has the power to take action to limit TikTok’s influence. In fact, a bipartisan bill that would ban TikTok in the United States appears to have the support of President Joe Biden. But ultimately, the responsibility to protect children from TikTok’s pernicious effects lies with parents. And regardless of whether Washington decides to act, families should — and quickly.