Why Is TikTok Pushing Teens to Commit Suicide?

In several years, TikTok was able to be on top of smart applications, overrunning US giants Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

The application’s quick rise was accompanied by a continuous controversy about its dangers related to its users’ mental health, adults, and children. This is clearly evident with calls to deinstall it from phones, after confirming its role in cases of addiction and even suicide recorded by several countries around the world.

 

Global Domination

On December 12, 2022, Social Media Today revealed that the TikTok application has excelled on a monthly basis in terms of the number of downloads on smartphones compared to all other social media applications, especially for the adolescent and young adult category.

The AppFigures platform confirmed that TikTok maintained its dominance in the global application market in November 2022, overrunning Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

On an annual basis, TikTok outperformed, in terms of the number of downloads on all social media applications, by about 4 billion times around the world in 2022, followed by Facebook, with more than 3 billion times.

TikTok defeated every other application, despite the constant concerns about its growth globally due to the challenges it faces in countries such as America.

TikTok surprised many when it succeeded in displacing the giants Google and Facebook from the top of the most visited sites list in 2021, according to Cloudflare, a large network of servers that can improve the security, performance, and reliability of anything connected to the Internet.

The company stated in its annual analysis that many websites, led by TikTok, benefited from the increase in home Internet consumption after the Corona pandemic.

It added that the Chinese application, launched in 2016, began to outperform the rest of the applications globally in early 2021, as the number of its users exceeded those who visited Google for the first time on February 17.

The same happened in March and May, but after August 10, TikTok preserved its position on top of the most visited sites list, which Google launched in 2020.

 

An alarming Rise

Commenting on Cloudflare’s analysis, digital media expert Mohammed Abdullah said that TikTok has a higher rate of views than various platforms, and even within the United States, users spend more time using it.

Abdullah attributed the growth of visits in TikTok to the algorithm adopted by the application, explaining that it made it compete strongly with international companies that have a long history in controlling the Internet space.

The application rose from seventh place in 2020 to first place in 2021, overrunning Facebook in social media applications, and was able to beat Google as well, according to Abdullah.

TikTok gives users, especially teenagers and young adults, a great opportunity to publish visual content through which they can freely express themselves and quickly increase the number of their followers compared to other applications.

Among other reasons, Abdullah pointed out that the application’s policy does not place many restrictions or complicated ways for use. The most attractive feature in the application is the short videos of humor and imitation.

TikTok does not require a login or age verification, although it requires the user to be over 13 years old, but it takes them directly to the content of the application—a strategy that contributed to a further increase in the number of users and visits.

Amidst this global domination, on December 14, 2022, the US Senate passed a bill banning federal employees from using the TikTok app on government-owned devices.

The latest vote is, according to Wall Street Journal, the latest measure by US lawmakers to suppress the Chinese application, amid fears that Beijing may use it to spy on Americans, in addition to other risks.

In 2020, former US President Donald Trump tried to prevent Americans from downloading the app, but many court battles postponed this action.

However, many federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and State Departments, already block the app on government-owned devices.

On the other hand, the newspaper pointed out that TikTok has become the most popular in the world and is used by two-thirds of American teenagers, adding that the company has repeatedly confirmed that it has never shared user data with the Chinese government and will not do so if requested.

For its part, TikTok said in a statement the same day that US concerns were fueled by “misinformation.”

“We are disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States.”

 

Big Risks

TikTok is the social networking application most haunted by accusations of causing children and adolescents to become addicted and obsessed with searching for filters to appear perfect on videos. This led many of them to suffer from neurological and psychological diseases such as anorexia, depression, and insomnia.

These children and adolescents have become a strong reason for new efforts to go to court and hold companies that lead the most popular digital platforms responsible for the alleged dangers of social media.

Bloomberg reported on October 4, 2022, that more than 70 lawsuits were filed in 2022 against social media applications, led by TikTok.

It said the lawsuits are based on claims by teens and young adults that they have suffered from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and insomnia.

The plaintiffs, in at least seven cases, were parents whose children committed suicide, as the lawsuits held TikTok responsible for its algorithms.

It explained that the idea of holding social media companies responsible for the potential damage their products may cause to young people arose in late 2021 when Frances Haugen, a former Meta Platforms employee, revealed dangerous documents.

Haugen’s claims included the company deliberately exploiting vulnerable youth in order to increase its profits, revealing that an internal study conducted by Meta’s Instagram found evidence that many teenage girls who use the photo-sharing application suffer from depression and anxiety due to complexes related to their body shape or the color of their skin.

A federal appeals court in California in 2021 issued its ruling in one of the claims based on product liability that a lawsuit could be filed because of the filters used in the TikTok and Snapchat applications that allow driving speed recording, encouraging teenagers to drive recklessly, and leading to fatal accidents.

In the latest images of the dangers of these filters, Egyptian media revealed on December 21, 2022, that a 10-year-old died inside his room after performing a new challenge on TikTok called the “blackout challenge.”

The investigations of the Egyptian prosecution revealed that this child was imitating videos of older youths on TikTok as they competed with each other in the blackout challenge.

The child tied a rope to the fan, put it around his neck, and started screaming, but the family could not save him. In this challenge, some young people hang themselves through a rope for a period of time to see who can resist longer.

The dangers of the application did not stop at teenagers, as the famous American dancer and comedian Stephen Boss, known as “tWitch,” ended his life at the age of 40 on December 14, 2022.

Los Angeles police received a call from a city hotel to find Stephen Boss dead of his self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

The suicide came two days after the black-skinned Boss posted a fun and dancing video with his wife, Allison Holker, a blonde influencer, on social media platforms.

While it is not yet clear the real reason behind the sudden suicide, some activists linked the matter to the rampant sarcasm or bullying phenomenon in TikTok, on which about 6 million people followed Boss.

Boss left behind three children: Weslie Fowler, 14, Zaia, 3, Maddox Laurel, 6. His wife, Holker, told People magazine: “He was the backbone of the family, the best husband and father, and an inspiration to his fans.”