This video is a very short example of the some the many harmful or sick trends that always going around TikTok. This post intends to showcase TikTok’s influence on society, and therefore political culture. Now the platform tiktok is a recently popular social media platform that has taken the internet by storm. Hopefully you may know about the deeper problems regarding tiktok, but if not, reading this post will be a start (may become ranty). Among the many problems around this platform ranging from surface issues such as attention spans and complete invasion of privacy (these shouldn’t be surface level issues but believe me when i say it gets much worse); to much sinister issues from child pornography and sexualiztion of children to manipulation of countries elections. TikTok is influencing and manipulating people, politics, children, and manipulating society and political culture as a whole, for the worst.
First of all TikTok is owned by a Chinese tec company and is required by law to report all data analytics to the Chinese government. This means everything you watch, click, and like is all collected by the company and by China, furthermore, the app on your phone itself is a privacy violation, and even information not relating to TikTok on your device is collected. This is why United States government has banned it from all their devices and on all employee personal devices as well (USA tried to ban nationwide but unfortunately failed). And this data collection is blatantly stated in TikTok’s privacy statement.
With this data, Tiktok feeds it into algorithms, tracking every second of your usage to manipulate what you see and what you will see next. For example, if you spend 30 seconds watching a video concerning anti abortion vs 5 seconds about pro life, the algorithm will assume you to like anti abortion content more, and will show more of that material and less (if at all) content from with a different opinion, in order to keep you watching. This puts you into an eco chamber of confirmation bias that you may not even know you are apart of. Making our very polarized nation even more polarized. Moreover, this politicided platform is not even designed for intellectual conversation. It is designed for short clips to just suck you into a reel of dopamine hits. It’s the same problem twitter had, with people trying to put entire conversations of world issues into 150 character word limits; it just doesn’t work, even if people did listen to you. That’s even assuming your content makes it out to people, and gets past the companies censorship policies. On top of all this, the majority of users are probably even fake, bots are in swarms on every social media platform to dilute real peoples opinions, but I’ll just briefly mention that larger topic. This may not seem like a big deal to some “who cares Tiktok knows I’m a Biden supporter” but if you consider how they have full transparency over the billion of people with this app, you can imagine the amount of power that holds. And with the media power to control what people see, this can company can single handedly influence upcoming democratic elections.
This blog post is very summary based, because of how large the problems conversations can go. This article was more intended to spread awareness to people who may be unknowing to the effects of social media and Tiktok on society. That said I highly HIGHLY encourage you you look further into this yourself, fore i have run out of room I’ll post below some watch recommendations to be more informed on this issue. If you don’t want to learn more I’ll leave you with this one request:
For the love of god delete TikTok, and for the love of humanity’s future keep Tiktok off of the devices of your children and younger siblings.
Want to learn more about how all social media platforms work and manipulate? Watch “The Social Dilemma” documentary on Netflix. (If I was president I would require the nation to watch this, I think its that critical of a documentary)
Want to learn more about TikTok in general? Watch this video: Youtube “TikTok Is Worse Than You Thought” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7STD2ESmWg&list=PLwoNCHuITQY3CXAYpTK74hv8JfwBS59RI&index=17&t=5s
Want to learn about TikTok and youth? (How older men on the platform are sexually harassing and even sickly paying children to bend down to touch their toes?) Watch this video: Youtube “TikTok is Poisoning Society” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbv-VteX5H8
I do see your point on several aspects of your summary. Although I do agree with a lot of it, and I do think media is a huge problem in society today I think it is parents’ individual responsibility to educate their kids on internet safety and manipulation. TikTok isn’t necessarily dangerous because of what it is, but because parents are not checking on what their kids are watching and young adults/adults are not educating themselves on real-world issues instead they are listening to TikTok influencers as their only source. I do believe TikTok to have several fun aspects and fun interactions if you know what you are doing on your social media!