I’m addicted to TikTok. I’m begging the government to ban it

I downloaded TikTok back in 2020, by which point it had moved from cringe teen fad to pandemic must-have. Since then, I’ve seen my attention span fracture and metastasize. The endless scroll subsumed me, along with some 48 million others in my Gen Z cohort.

Now, TikTok’s status in the United States is being questioned. A looming divest-or-ban law from the Biden administration mandates that the company behind the app, ByteDance, sell off the U.S. iteration of TikTok. (Potential buyers include Steve Mnuchin and Frank McCourt). ByteDance is now challenging the order in court, and the Justice Department is requesting a decision by December.

A certified doom-scroller, I’ve found myself reading every minute update regarding the trial. And yet, after a few minutes, I’m back on TikTik, watching old clips of Modern Family and bite-size recipes. 

And therein lies the contradiction: I know the app is destroying my attention span and burdening my mental health, and yet I’m unwilling to delete it. Maybe a national ban would help. 

A bottomless pit of content

I grew up in the age of social media, spending my childhood reposting iFunny memes on Instagram and clogging my brain with YouTuber-speak. By middle school, Snapchat had become a way of life; in high school, my friends and I donned a pseudo-intellectualism by making Twitter accounts. 

When it comes to short-form video, though, I was stuck in the middle of two app booms. A smidge too old for Vine, I’d stay up late watching compilations of the seven-second clips on YouTube, nostalgic for an era I never lived. But Musical.ly, which was also owned by ByteDance, was far too babyish; during the app’s heyday in 2016, my seventh-grade self was far too snooty for lip-syncs. 

This contempt also kept me off TikTok for much of its initial boom, which came around 2018, after ByteDance merged Musical.ly and TikTok into one platform of unending reels. I wouldn’t download TikTok until 2020, during the peak of the pandemic, when I was desperate for anything that promised to fend off the solitude of virtual high school and geographic isolation. My screen time went up and up; there was no bottom to the pit of my TikTok consumption. 

And it’s never gone away. Now a senior in college, TikTok takes on a more social role in my life. My friends and I speak to each other in trendy aphorisms, knowing our algorithm will feed us similar content. (For almost a month in 2021, every sentence ended with “and I’ve always said that,” based on a single popular TikTok.) I likely send TikToks to my friends more than I text them directly.

To be clear: I’m a social person. I go out like any other college student. What’s so often lost by the generations above, looking down and trying to interpret internet culture, is just how far these mediums have permeated young people’s lifestyles. Obsessive social media usage isn’t the exception; it’s the norm. Being on social media doesn’t come at the expense of my social life.

But as I coast into an equally online adulthood, we’re starting to open up conversations about just how healthy these apps are. New York City has banned phone usage in school, as has Florida. The surgeon general argued that social media companies needed to add warning labels for kids. Study after study links TikTok with negative mental health outcomes. 

The dysmorphic online ecosystem

It’s a curious feeling to learn about just how warped your own habits have become. Reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, in which he details exactly how the proliferation of social media in young people’s lives has damaged their psyche, I felt a subtle loathing. Shouldn’t someone have known? Shouldn’t someone have looked out for me, for my generation? 

But every generation has its woe. Gen Xers grew up wishing for stability in the home, facing widely distant parents. Millennials faced economic woes and a recession, being scolded relentlessly for their love of avocado toast amid a flailing job market. Maybe Gen Z’s conundrum is digital: We were simply forked over to the dysmorphic online ecosystem. 

Now, as the TikTok ban makes its way through the courts, I’m inclined to believe that this could be a cure-all. Maybe a ban could replenish my generation’s fractured attention spans, could slow our devolving mental health. I’ll never delete the app on my own—the government could be providing the push I need.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91202220/im-addicted-to-tiktok-im-begging-the-government-to-ban-it?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss