A 17-year-old college boy, Shakib Ahmed, is going through mental trauma and depression. One day, he was slothfully browsing through the Play Store to find his preferred app and spotted 'TikTok' which was displayed as the top app in the social networking sector with over 3,00,00,00,000 downloads. The advertising section drew his mind. He downloaded it, installed it, created an account quickly, and started surfing in the deep ocean of in-vogue videos. Firstly, TikTok showed the most popular videos with tons of views, but he skipped those and moved on to depressive content and pieces of stuff related to sadness and despair. Then, the recommendation engine started showing videos with sad vibes and depression to Shakib, even though those videos had rarer views and were inimical for him. He gave some of those videos an immediate double-tap and followed some 'Sassy' content creators. In less than 40 minutes, he watched more than a hundred depressing content and bleak videos. Days passed, he started giving more time to his closest buddy 'TikTok' and his watch hour vaulted from less than one hour to more than 3 hours, and what's more worrisome is that he watched those in a stretch, mindlessly lying in the cozy bed of his room.
The above story is only one of many typical depictions of a juvenile using TikTok, and the situation is far worse in general. Since its launch in August 2018, TikTok has become one of the most popular social media apps, with over 1.1 billion active monthly users globally. Its endless loop of quick videos can vary from dancing challenges to pranks, and this hodgepodge is what makes the app so famous. To be frank, TikTok isn't all awful. Everyone can go viral on the app, which is incredibly advantageous to anyone from small independent artists to emerging local enterprises. Thanks to the 'For You' section, the app subsidizes easy advertising and a space for artists to find an association of people who delicately relish their work. These are only a few of the ample reasons why TikTok has grown so famous, but there is no such thing as good without evil.
However, some of the app's material encourages insecurity and self-hatred amongst young and susceptible users. While TikTok has unquestionable stupendous effects, there are also unintended repercussions that directly affect our generation. Some of TikTok's various challenges become famous partly due to the attractiveness of the individuals who partake in them. Challenges like the stargazing fad implicate people laying on their beds and looking up at their ceiling, showing their chiseled jawlines and 'faultless' facial profile. Recently, TikTok's 'Sprite Challenge' has gone viral, with individuals recreating it and gaining millions of views. There are several prerequisites for the challenge, and the one who meets them wins. Participants are challenged to drink an entire can or bottle of Sprite, with the winner being the individual who finishes without gauging or burping. However, current investigations reveal that as a result, teeth would bleach, causing enamel erosion, diabetes risk, obesity danger, including kidney and liver damage from massive sugar consumption in a short period. These and other deadly challenges might lead to individuals comparing themselves to popular users, resulting in insecurities they didn't even realize they possessed. There are other instances where TikTok's community guidelines can cause people to feel embarrassed about what they glance like. For example, because Abul Hasan is plus-sized, his culinary video was deleted from TikTok. At the same time, similar content remained on the platform after being submitted by people who meet 'alluring' prettiness standards more closely.
Let's return to the life of Shakib Ahmed. You could wonder why TikTok kept advertising more and more vulnerable content to him, even though it was detrimental. Here is the answer. According to Guillaume Chaslot, founder of AlgoTransparency, “The algorithm of TikTok can get much more powerful, and it can be able to learn your vulnerabilities much faster. On YouTube, 70% of the views come from the recommendation engine, which is already huge. In the case of TikTok, it is even worse; more than 90-95% of views come from the recommendation engine”. Let me elucidate this. It states that the TikTok app even recommends content based on your clicks and pauses, not only just based on likes and follows. It takes TikTok less than 40 minutes to bake the cake of your desired taste with surfeit sugar in it, even though that tasty cake is deleterious to us. Behind everything, there is a single ax to grind, 'watch time'. To keep you on the app longer, it will offer you more sugary cakes regardless of how or in what way it affects your life, which is even against their community guidelines. Users may swipe for hours without noticing since there is always new stuff available with the sweep of a finger. According to Federal Computer Week, this incessant swiping prepares the brain to appraise the significance of things within the first 15 seconds of their discovery. This short attention span and quick-to-judge attitude can spill over into daily activities, causing irritability and inattentiveness at work, school, and even during interactions. It floods our brains with dopamine and gives us the feeling that fresh stuff is just a swipe away, making it even more onerous to look away from the screen. Because of its ingenious algorithm, there's no need to look for something particular, like TV channel scrolling or YouTube video browsing, instead, on TikTok, the cake (preferred video) is automatically in front of us.
It is an open secret that spending too much time on social media may disrupt our sleep and cause us to have unrealistic expectations of other people's lives. It makes us feel worse about ourselves, which leads to sadness and apprehension. Because it is so easy to remark on a video on TikTok, bullying is rampant, and one troll may send several awful messages in under an hour to the creator. National Science Foundation says an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day from what we watch, listen, and read. Negative thoughts account for 80% of them, whereas repetitive thoughts account for 95%. If we repeatedly think about those negative concepts, we will begin to think negatively far more frequently than positively. Imagine the cosmic amount of harm you have done to your incredible potential in a week of an average of 40 hours of work time if you spend about 21 hours simply watching TikTok videos. Armenia, Azerbaijan, China (they have their special Chinese version of the app called Douyin by the Bytedance company, which also owns TikTok), Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States of America temporarily restricted TikTok in recent years, and the Indian government completely banned it. The Dhaka High Court urged the Bangladesh government to restrict 'dangerous and damaging' apps like TikTok, PUBG, and Free Fire in August 2020 to protect children and adolescents from moral and social degradation.
In my opinion, despite everything, TikTok isn't damaging enough, so it should not be banned completely. But emphasizing the platform's detrimental effects on young and impressionable users is vital. It's more important than ever to consider before you post and limit your TikTok usage rather than blithely browsing through it all day. Do one thing today. Take a walk outside without your phone and see how stunning the world is! This TikTok is created by us, and the onus is on us to control it rather than being controlled by it.