TikTok challenges all of us to protect children
ASK a teenager what they think of TikTok, and they will probably reply that it’s a good fun app, or something to that effect. Ask their parents and they will shrug their shoulders at the kids’ craze for videoing themselves doing daft dances or gurning at the camera while miming to songs. Like Top of the Pops and MTV, features of my coming-of-age, TikTok exemplifies the modern generation gap as a central plank of today’s youth culture and home of the internet’s more viral trends .
Parents hope that it is no more damaging than the frequently overplayed moral hazards once associated with watching TV, even if recent events hint that this style of wishful thinking is as dangerously deluded as some of TikTok’s more hairraising challenges.
Alarm bells should have rung when hazardous TikTok challenges became linked to several teen deaths. The terrifying Angel of Death challenge has teenagers jumping out in front of moving trucks in the hope the vehicles will swerve to avoid them, while ‘chroming’ involves inhaling toxic substances to create a temporary high, similar to the effects of alcohol and producing deadly side effects like heart attacks, seizures, coma or choking.
GARDAí are investigating whether chroming played a role in the tragic death of 14-yearold schoolgirl Sarah Mescall from Co. Clare. Sarah collapsed last week and was rushed to hospital where she was placed in an induced coma. Her heartbroken family and friends attended her funeral on Friday.
The harm potentially caused by TikTok is not just physical. The app also spreads misinformation, which the company tacitly acknowledged in its disclosure of how it dismantled a ‘covert influence operation’ network dedicated to targeting Irish users with ‘divisive ‘ content to ‘intensify social conflict’. It appears the mystery network was made up of 72 accounts that together had a following of almost 95,000 users and it was shut down earlier this year.
How many of these users were teenagers who, undereducated and eager to
impress, are highly susceptible to brainwashing and for whom experts say TikTok is a key space for youth activism and political engagement?
Other than removing hashtags from the ominous-sounding Blackout Challenge and the like, TikTok like the other self-regulatory social media companies doesn’t want to police the toxicity of its platform properly.
The desire to safeguard its hands-off approach is the impetus for its High Court challenge to the Data Protection Commission’s fine for failing to protect child privacy on the site. Given the company’s vast profits, it’s doubtful the €345m fine troubled it unduly in the convenience of TikTok rather than the safety of minors prevails.
HOW much longer can this laissezfaire attitude to children’s safety be tolerated and social media continue like the wild west, its owners hiding behind internet exceptionalism or parroting the gun lobby’s self-serving mantra that it’s not the weapons that are at fault but the people who use them?
We have uncomfortable memories of censorship in this country, of harmless books being banned and censorship on RTÉ, an overweening authoritarianism that we don’t want to see again.
Children need to learn how to regulate their behaviour around their mobile phones, so it is pointless to simply suggest keeping them away from technology. Children live in the real world, but the real world must respond by making sure that digital platforms remove content that harms children in any way.
It’s high time that the geniuses at TikTok made appropriate moves to at least engage with the harms they can cause.