Home ›› 21 Oct 2022 ›› Opinion
TikTok has a lot to answer for. In Britain, regulators want to fine the social media app for violating the privacy of minors. In California, the app faces a freshly bundled 80-pack of lawsuits charging it and other social media apps with hooking kids on the site. The Biden White House is pressuring the Chinese-owned app to improve data security, and some policy lords want at least part of it sold to an American or its American data stored domestically. When not denouncing TikTok for ruining the mental health of its young users, killing them, shortening our attention spans, serving oodles of political misinformation or contributing to political polarization, writers and lawsuits fault it for encouraging every self-destructive behavior from cutting to anorexia.
These criticisms land particularly hard on TikTok because it has recently conquered the internet. TikTok now gets more visits than Google. Its average American viewer logs on for 80 minutes a day. And two-thirds of our teens use it. Once considered a delightful boon that entertained and diverted, the time-wasting app has recently followed the path of other new media sensations to become regarded as a bane. A cultural sensation of the 2020s, TikTok has also become the internet’s whipping boy, shamed by governments and advocates more often these days than even Facebook.
Let’s stipulate from the get-go that TikTok deserves most of the bricks thrown at it. But in inventorying TikTok’s many downsides, let’s not forget to place the app in a historical context that might deflect some of the collective fury aimed at it. Setting aside for a moment the fact that Chinese proprietors control the personal data tossed off by the app, TikTok has much to commend it, and we shouldn’t be shy about saying so.
New forms of media and communication have attracted suspicion and hostility ever since Plato denounced writing as something corrosive to memory. When the telegraph arrived in 1858, the New York Times denounced it as “superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth,” and others declared it was a new way “to cheat, steal, lie, and deceive,” as historian Tom Standage put it. The telephone earned similar opprobrium for breaching class and family order. It allowed anybody to enter your home. It turned the socially minded into shut-ins. It reduced parents’ gatekeeper power over their children. In 1894, a Philadelphia newspaper editor warned readers that disease could be spread over a telephone line. Similar scaremongering attended the arrival of radio and television, which allegedly polluted morals and vegetized viewers. More of the same has been directed at computer games, the internet and smartphones, and will be used against VR if ever widely adopted. In the 1890s, some critics even diagnosed societal dangers in electrification.
The basest criticism of TikTok’s algorithm-powered river of short videos is that it’s a worthless time-sink, a sordid place for teenagers to swipe mindlessly though a never-ending deck of videos until their fingers blister. But is this uniquely bad? Wasting time on a silly diversion commands a solid pedigree. It’s called leisure time. Do not millions of grown-up house-spouses and retirees chain-watch soaps or cable news all afternoon without having to eat a griefburger over it? How many Americans tank up on football all weekend and then return on Monday and Thursday nights for refills?
Yes, today’s average adolescent might be squandering an hour-and-a-half on TikTok daily, but haven’t earlier generations spent equal amounts of watching mindless television? Didn’t ’60s kids dial their transistor radio tuners from station to station in search of the perfect beat the way today’s TikTok users swipe though the app looking for stimulation? Weren’t there ’90s scares about “internet addiction”? Previous generations wasted hours each day talking to their boyfriends and girlfriends on the phone.
Politico
