The ‘TikTok Taoiseach’ is perfectly placed to tackle online threat to teens

THERE is a line in The Simpsons Movie that tickled me as a parent and, in the years after the movie’s release, was often quoted in our home. After some minor disaster befalls Bart in the film, the petulant child laments that this is ‘the worst day of my life’. ‘So far,’ corrects his, for once, perceptive father, Homer.

As my own children became teenagers and the usual series of unfortunate events befell them, they in turn would dramatically declare certain days the worst of their lives. ‘So far,’ I would gleefully remind them. And of course, better – and worse – days would ensue, because such is life.

But imagine if, instead of sighing in our kitchen at their own cursed luck, my young teenagers had taken their bad days to TikTok.

On Prime Time tonight, an investigation into the algorithms used by that social media behemoth will reveal how children as young as 13 are being fed videos featuring mental health crises and incidents of selfharm and suicidal ideation – content that can very easily turn minor dramas into major problems and very real worst days ever.

Reporters for the show created three fake TikTok accounts on phones with new operating systems and, when prompted, gave the users’ dates of birth as being in 2011 – leading TikTok to believe the subscribers were aged 13. The journalists did not search for topics, ‘like’ or comment on videos, or engage with content in any similar way. They watched the videos shown by TikTok on the ‘For You’ feed, and when shown videos related to topics such as parental relationships, loneliness or feelings of isolation, they watched them twice.

Within minutes, the accounts which TikTok understood to be controlled by 13-year-old users were into a mental health content rabbit hole, being fed videos about young people selfharming and describing depression, overlaying some scenes with text such as, ‘Holding it together so my mom doesn’t have to sit at my funeral wondering what she did wrong’.

Prime Time recorded the TikTok feeds and sent them to the platform, which has its European headquarters in Dublin. TikTok’s response – ahead of its appearance at the Oireachtas Children’s Committee yesterday afternoon – was reasonably robust, but it seems likely this is an issue that will run and run.

Separately, Meta, formerly Facebook, was set to outline proposed new user age verification measures to the same Oireachtas committee yesterday, but it’s worth noting that in the case of the Prime Time investigation, TikTok understood the ‘users’ involved to be just 13 years old.

THERE is nothing wrong with engaging children and teenagers in discussions about mental health. But in an unsupervised space like social media, the danger is that ordinary bad days and downbeat moods can quickly be elevated to full-blown mental health crises, depression and worse.

Everybody gets the blues and with hormones racing around young bodies, bad days can often legitimately feel like the worst days – just ask Bart Simpson. This is normal life; it’s part of regular adolescence and children and teenagers need to be reassured what they’re feeling is all part of life’s regular rich tapestry.

Of course young people can suffer with poor mental health and depression, but that is not the norm and in an unregulated forum, children can easily be convinced that what they’re feeling is much worse than it really is.

I don’t know what we do about this. I’m part of a generation that is not particularly tech-savvy and, mercifully, my own children grew up in a less social media-centric world. But it’s been obvious for some time that children’s exposure to social media and online sources is problematic and increasingly toxic. Last night’s Prime Time Investigates and the committee hearings are important parts of the conversation about this, but it’s not enough to acknowledge the dangers; solutions must be found.

Now if only we had a Taoiseach from a younger generation who was familiar with these powerful new social media platforms… then we might just begin to tackle this egregious threat to our children.