Since the rise of various social media platforms throughout the 21st century, it seems that people all over the globe are being sucked into the vortex of online social interactions. The rise began in 2006 when Facebook rose to prominence, connecting us to friends and loved ones. On the app, you were able to post status updates which informed your community of all the activities you were up to. However, social media truly didn’t take off until 2010, when Instagram was released to the public. In the new era of smartphones, suddenly you were able to access not only the profiles of people you knew, but of celebrities and different people all over the world. Social media sucked the public in, particularly the youth and young adults. One of the most prominent social media apps popular with such demographics is also one of the most addicting: TikTok.
Recently, TikTok has been under scrutiny for its Chinese owned parent company ByteDance, with the House of Representatives even passing a bill that could ban the app in the United States if TikTok is not sold to a new company. If the bill is approved by the Senate and the President, the United States would effectively ban its citizens from using one of the most popular apps in the world. While the bill has more to do with concerns over data privacy, one cannot help but wonder if the concerns related to young adult mental health were also a part of the push to ban the app.
In recent years, TikTok has come under scrutiny for the potential harm it can have on mental health. Statistics on TikTok’s demographics suggest that about 47.4% of its users are under the age of 30. This is particularly concerning when you do a deeper dive into the harmful content being allowed on the app. In a study conducted by the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, sample users found that within 20 minutes of using the app, subjects were shown videos encouraging self-harm behaviors if they expressed interest in topics related to mental health. TikTok has also been criticized for allowing pro-eating disorder content reminiscent of early 2000s pro-anorexia blogs. Extreme diets, exercise plans and extremely emaciated bodies are not only shown on the app, but are placed into the feeds of young children and adults — particularly onto the pages of young girls.
Furthermore, when you explore the addictive nature of the app, these findings become more disturbing. TikTok is designed to work best with short form content. Videos around or under 30 seconds in length are commonplace on the app, leading your attention span to diminish. This causes you to keep scrolling, searching for more and more content to watch. With an app like TikTok, content quite literally never ends. You could be on TikTok for an entire day and still not make a dent into the amount of content on the app. Additionally, the format of TikTok makes it so that your personal feed (or the For You page as it is called by the app), is carefully curated to your exact tastes. For example, if you interact with kitten videos, your page is likely to be full of even more kitten videos. This format can curate a positive feed, but oftentimes it does the opposite. If you interact with sad or harmful content, your entire feed will be geared towards showing you this type of content. Seeing so much harmful content is likely to affect your mood and maybe even distort your sense of self-worth.
As with any app, TikTok has many positive and negative attributes. On the one hand, the platform, like other social media apps, can connect us with others around the world and provide all the culture those connections have to offer us. However, engaging with harmful content on social media apps can hurt our health and wellness in many ways. As the role of TikTok and other social media apps in the lives of youth becomes more prevalent, we are bound to see all the effects of social media use — whether they be positive or negative.