Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, boasting millions of users. Once it was just an exciting new way for people to lip-sync to their favorite songs, but now it has become a cesspool of content dizziness harming the youth in our country.
Of course, the fact that the Communist Chinese government owns the app raises significant concerns about its influence on Western Culture. However, the impact that it has on individuals is also problematic and should be addressed.
Faith Kuzma, a retired English professor, argues that TikTok has an outsized impact on the minds of young women.
Kuzma describes the experience of “spiraling” on TikTok. She says “Spiraling is an actual psychological term for becoming mentally dizzy. TikTok’s ‘for you page’ is overwhelming, piping a steady stream of the most viral videos to kids.” The content being funneled to kids is not nice and wholesome. Troves of age-inappropriate material are shown to the children who use the app daily.
“It’s a world saturated with an over-abundance of consciousness: self-consciousness, body-consciousness, identity-consciousness,” Kuzma says. It’s “Ideal for getting girls to spiral”.
Likes and follows are the traps traditionally used by social media to get and keep people addicted to scrolling, but TikTok has far more advanced data collection. Teen magazine observed: “Every second you hesitate or re-watch, the app tracks you.”
TikTok’s extremely complex data collection and algorithms allow the app to finely tune content for every user. It’s not just a business model – it is a complete mental capture, impacting a young person’s brain like a hard drug. The algorithm means that young people can spiral into rabbit holes and barely realize it’s happening. This algorithmic spiraling has contributed to the transgender craze, as well as the rise of antisemitism among American youth.
TikTok must be stopped, not only because it’s a propaganda tool of Chinese communists, but also because it is a public health crisis.
