By Sienna St. Paul
Scientists are growing concerned about the effects that the app TikTok is having on the brains of young people, and they are convinced that ‘TikTok Brain’ is a real thing. TikTok’s popularity exploded during the early days of the pandemic, where many people were struggling to find a source of entertainment during lockdown inside of their homes. The combination of 15-30 second video clips, niche content and lip-syncing videos aroused interest in many and according to The Social Sheperd, the app has been downloaded 3.5 billion times since it emerged in 2017 out of the Chinese video-sharing app Douyin. Some benefits of TikTok include: it’s user-friendly, it enables users to stay on top of trends and it increases brand awareness. However the app also has many negatives which seem to be seriously affecting childrens’ brains.
Part of what has made TikTok such a great success and has kept so many users hooked is the company’s “For you Page” and the algorithm that populates it. Its unique algorithm uses machine learning to develop a personality profile for individuals. Other platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have algorithms that display your viewer list based on your activity, who it thinks you’re closest to and people that have a similar amount of followers to you. However, TikTok uses a proprietary algorithm known as the ‘For You’ algorithm. So you don’t need to form a social network or list your interests before the app begins tailoring content that suits your preferences. You simply just have to watch videos you enjoy and skip those that you don’t and this is enough for the app to begin collecting data about you.
Another aspect of TikTok that makes this app particularly irresistible is the length of the videos. Each TikTok video is typically much shorter than that of a YouTube video, therefore the app is able to acquire data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to feed you an endless stream of content it knows you will be interested in. However, TikTok isn’t actually interested in the buttons you click or the people you follow, but rather the length of time which you spend watching a particular piece of content. One video of an influencer dancing or lip-syncing might seem harmless, but once the algorithm grabs your attention it continues to display similar content to you, feeding your obsessions by playing hypnotic content that heightens your chances of becoming addicted to the app.
A study conducted by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health showed that there was an association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain’s gray matter, and “digital dementia”. These are problems that come from addiction to social media in general, but there is something about TikTok in particular which makes it especially dangerous.
For an individual to develop and maintain certain mental faculties, such as memory and attention span, one needs to practise them. Use of TikTok disables an individual from doing this, as the algorithm provides you the exact content that you want to see without you having to actually do anything at all. This makes it a rather passive and uninteractive app that really doesn’t do much for improving one’s intelligence or intellectual abilities.
Every time a user watches a TikTok video, dopamine, a neurotransmitter which is involved in the brain’s reward system, is released in the brain. The excitatory nature of dopamine is one of the reasons it is so powerful, and can encourage our brain cells to take certain actions, influencing our behaviour. There is little that can compete with this type of stimulation, making younger children and teens especially susceptible to addiction as their brains do not fully develop until the age of 25-30 years old.
Not only does TikTok pose a threat to the mentality of many young children and teens worldwide, but also poses a physical threat too. The app promotes irrational behaviour, encouraging acts of iodiocy through participation in supposed “trends” and “challenges” with the hope that young people will gain “TikTok fame”. Some of these trends included ‘tooth-filing’ where amateur cosmetitiains thought they could fix their uneven smiles through use of a nail file, the ‘devious-lick’ challenge, encouraging kids to vandalize property, and arguably the worst challenge of them all, ‘the blackout challenge’. This was where kids purposefully choked themselves with household items in an attempt to black-out, resulting in some fatalities, one being a 10-year-old girl and the other a 12-year-old boy. But this is not the extent of the damaging content that TikTok provides to its users. According to the Guardian, “The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that the video-sharing site will promote content including dangerously restrictive diets, pro-self-harm content and content romanticising suicide to users who show a preference for the material, even if they are registered as under-18s..”
It is clear that TikTok poses a major threat to its users, highlighting its potential use as a new kind of weapon which does not inflict physical pain, but seeks to neutralize its enemies by inflicting pleasure.
FBI director Chris Wray warned that TikTok was owned by a Chinese government that holds the key to the app’s recommendation algorithm and therefore is able “to manipulate content…to use it for influence operations.” There are also indications that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of the impact TikTok’s mind-numbing content has on its viewers. This is evident from the fact that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is only available to Chinese children for 40 minutes a day and is not available for use from 10pm – 6am. Furthermore, the children are not exposed to ridicule and idiocy but rather educational videos and scientific experiments. This idea is further insinuated by a survey conducted where American and Chinese children were asked what job they wanted most. The top answer amongst the Chinese children was ‘astronaut’ and the top answer amongst the American children was ‘influencer.’
The threat that TikTok poses to the mental health of many of its viewers, especially its younger audience, is clear. The problem is not necessarily that one dancing video, or that one lip-syncing video, but rather the detrimental effects that watching these pointless, uneducating, addictive clips over and over again can have on an individual’s brain and overall intelligence. TikTok destroys so gradually that it seems harmless. But we cannot wait until the effects are visible to take action, for then it will be too late. Making small adaptations to your usage of the app in your everyday life can make a difference or even if parents look out for their own kids by setting up parental controls on devices to limit kids’ access. Ultimately, these are short term effects and the only way to prevent digital dementia is to expose the ugly side of apps like TikTok and raise awareness about the neurological damage wrought by them.