Most children over the age of twelve have access to TikTok. I wonder how many of their parents are actually paying attention to what is on that site.
On Tuesday, The New York Post posted an article written by a woman in her 30’s who posed as a 14-year-old boy on TikTok to see what would show up for her to view. The results were frightening.
The article reports:
My aim wasn’t to use Jayden’s profile to interact with other people online but rather just to see what sort of content the algorithm fed him if he was completely passive.
Within seconds of opening TikTok and YouTube as him, I was bombarded with a dizzying stream of videos of girls lip-syncing and twerking in mini-shorts.
After about a minute, things took a darker turn.
Mega influencers like stuntman-turned-boxer Logan Paul, 27, started popping up.
Paul stars in videos alongside the Sidemen, a popular British YouTube group known for offensive content — one member faced a backlash for his “rape face” video series in 2015.
In their “Sidemen Tinder in Real Life” YouTube series, the men often talk graphically to the women who are invited to their studio to make a potential love connection.
But instead of finding Mr. Right, the girls are often pummeled with insults about their physical appearance.
The most disturbing video I came across on TikTok, however, featured slow-motion footage of a boy, likely around Jayden’s age, in a classroom standing over a girl and swinging his closed fist toward her face as she recoiled.
Jayden was fed another TikTok video stamped with title “Calling my girlfriend the ‘B’ word for her reaction” featuring a young guy repeatedly barking the epithet at his significant other in the hopes of infuriating her for laughs.
Obviously this is not entertainment.
It is interesting to know that in China, the youth version of TikTok offers educational content including “novel and interesting popular science experiments, exhibitions in museums and galleries, beautiful scenery across the country, explanations of historical knowledge, and so on,” according to ByteDance. (article here) China also limits the amount of time its children spend on social media. What is the end goal of those who are feeding garbage to America’s children?