We’ve all been there: you get home from an exhausting day, collapse onto your bed, reach for your phone and… open TikTok (probably telling yourself you will only watch for a little while), before finally tearing your eyes from your screen approximately two hours later and realising with dread that you have wasted half of your evening. TikTok is a siren. It does this to us - lures you in with its bright colours and promise of stimulating entertainment and steals you away from the real world. It's called TikTok for a reason: it literally strips your time away. We are being collectively brainwashed in our own homes.
The time-stealing global phenomenon became accessible worldwide in 2014, under its initial name Musical.ly, but alongside its more fun sounding name, this original version was much more innocent. It featured videos of people lip-syncing and dancing to sped up and edited sounds, and was simple and fun, with 90 million users by the end of 2016. In 2018, the company was taken over by ByteDance and renamed ‘TikTok’. Five years later, user numbers have risen to over a staggering one billion. So why, if all it does it provide harmless clips that are monitored and protected, does it feel like it's brainwashing us and why is it so damaging for young minds?
Well, let me explain. Firstly, endless beauty filters are accessible to every user which blur every mark, smooth every pore, hide every imperfection; this is extremely damaging to young people – in their adolescent developmental stage – who see all the perfect people online and believe it is a true reflection of reality. Self-comparison is a disease, and it is poisoning Gen Z every time they look in the mirror and let their insecurities define and demolish them. It is unrealistic for these beauty standards to be achieved as most of the time they are near impossible, with stretched-in miniscule waists and airbrushed smooth skin. None of it is real. It aims to perpetuate to youth, especially to women, that their worth is defined by looks. Typically beautiful girls posting thirst traps will gain thousands, even millions of likes.
But to make it worse, when you film and post a TikTok of your own, the app automatically applies a beauty filter to your face (removable of course). Half of the people with this on wouldn’t even realise, or if they did, they would just feel a hidden sense of pride for their perfected face which overrides any guilty feelings of cheating the viewers, because they finally feel just as worthy as every other polished human using the same filters. TikTok sparks insecurity from every angle, which can be much more harmful than we realise.
With all of the billion people who have the app downloaded being vulnerable to harmful content and explicit language, TikTok needs to do more to protect its users from the tight grip of peer pressure through the screen. As a user of the app myself, I am aware of the many clever ways people get around Tik Tok's monitoring systems, including using numbers in the place of some letters in unacceptable language, or using phonetic spellings to avoid detection, and some underage users use hashtags like #fakebody to avoid videos with minors wearing revealing clothing being taken down by moderators. It is very easy to be sucked into darker videos and most harsh comments aren’t even censored, so it is no surprise many young and impressionable people are eased into bullying or even extremist videos which use racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language. Sure, there are report features but there needs to be at least a few responses to get videos or even accounts taken down, and when videos contain violent or graphic content there is a warning over the video but right below is an option to ‘watch anyway’. It hardly prevents content from reaching vulnerable people, and creators are constantly harassed and bullied in comment sections or stitched videos. TikTok has a culture of bullying named ‘cancel culture’ and users and creators feel like they must constantly tiptoe around to avoid being called out and harassed for simple mistakes. It is a toxic and unhealthy way to spend our social media hours.
Finally, TikTok is well known for its algorithm, which observes what videos you watch, like, save, or interact with, and then feeds you more of the same to keep you absorbed. There is a constant changing aspect of new trends and themes, and the algorithm provides a promise of forever entertainment that will keep you stimulated without any end. It is mentally exhausting, a tax on your brain. It is not possible to retain so much information at a pace like that. At the end of your daily TikTok scroll, stop, and try to remember at least five of the videos you’ve just watched. I can assure you, you will find your mind stumped and completely blank. It keeps you stuck scrolling with no clear or actual benefit, to the point where you can’t even remember what you’ve just seen.
TikTok is rising faster than we can fathom, and quicker than our human brains can process, and it is brainwashing us. Some would go as far as to say that social media enforces trivial news and trends to distract from other issues in society and forces us to have easily influenced passive values. Others would say it opens our eyes and gives youth a voice of united power. Whichever way you see it, TikTok is extremely risky, and it is dimming our imagination and natural creative minds daily. When will the scrolling ever end?