This should come as a surprise to no one, but TikTok knew. According to recent court filings by 14 attorneys generals, TikTok knew their platform was endangering and harming minors and they not only did nearly nothing to stop it, but actively pursued priorities that would make the situation worse. This adds to a growing mountain of evidence on the serious and lasting harms social media is inflicting on users,[1] especially children.

Last year the Wall Street Journal ran a series of disturbingly revealing articles on the harms Facebook and Instagram knew they were causing children, harms they did effectively nothing to mitigate. One article detailed results discovered through test accounts registered to fictitious children:

Instagram’s system served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos…

Findings detailed in other articles are too explicit to detail here, but Facebook and Instagram knew. They knew their product was destroying mental health, spiking depression and anxiety, and exacerbating young people’s body issues. Taking real and effective action would have killed “engagement” and tanked revenue. So kids were sacrificed for profit.

An Arms Race For Attention

In this most recent exposing of social media’s deleterious effects on users, especially youth, leaked internal documents from TikTok executives and team members show that they saw themselves in an “arms race for attention” against other social media giants, one they could only win if they moved forward with their addiction-inducing algorithms and never-ending, rapid-fire videos. And that’s what they did … with precision. Documents reveal that they knew exactly how long it would take to get the average user “addicted to the platform:” 35 minutes. If they could keep users’ attention for 35 minutes, they could induce addiction. And young people were prime targets. TikTok’s research showed, “As expected, across most engagement metrics, the younger the user, the better the performance” because “Minors do not have executive function to control their screen time…” TikTok knew. They knew they were exploiting children.

And they knew what excessive screen time did to people, especially children:

Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, and increased anxiety.

How can this not move us to weep! And Tiktok knew! Further, according to their own documents, TikTok knew,

Compulsive usage also interferes with personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.

This is utterly devastating and TikTok knew. One executive offered this:

I think we need to be cognizant of what [the app] might mean for other opportunities. And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes.

TikTok knew its platform actively interfered with sleeping, eating, moving around the room, even looking at someone in the eye! How can we not read this and ache in our soul?

Down To 107 Minutes Per Day

In public, TikTok touted its scree-time reminder, the nudge the platform was to offer users after they had exceeded a certain amount of continuous usage, but internal documents show that these were more about providing a useful “talking point” that would improve “public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage” and not about actually reducing screen-time. In reality, the tools resulted in a paltry 1.5 minute drop in usage (from teens using for 108.5 minutes per day to 107)! What meaningful difference would anyone expect from 1.5 minutes less in front of their platform? Internal communication, in fact, showed that their goal was “not to reduce the time spent” on its platform but to “contribute to DAU [daily active users] and retention” of users.

If that meant destroying a child’s perception of reality, so be it. If that meant interfering with sleep, school, and meaningful, three-dimensional connection with family, so be it. If that meant robbing a child from the ability to look another human in the eye, robbing them from the deep, emotional bond such eye contact produces, so be it. They were in an arms race for users’ attention. The goal was to win even if it mean children (and all of society) lost. TikTok knew.

Body Issues Abound

And TikTok knew its “beauty filters” were destroying young people’s mental health and self-perception. These beauty filters alter facial features, raising cheekbones, strengthening jawlines, enlarging lips and eyes, reducing waist sizes and marks of age. Besides being a lie, these filters propagate a narrow and arbitrarily chosen perception of what counts as beautiful, a definition only a fraction of a percent of real people meet. The app’s algorithms go so far as prioritize its definition of beautiful people, ensuring they are viewed more often than those it deems not attractive. How could this not distort users’ perception of their selves and of reality? How could this not leave users feeling perpetually inadequate and insufficient? How could this not exacerbate body issues? TikTok knew.

Illicit Leaks

TikTok also knew that its content moderation, which it touts in public, was a sham. TikTok’s documents refer to its substantial “leakage” rates. This refers to the rates at which illicit (i.e. sinful and evil) images “leak” through the defense systems that are supposed to protect users. Documents show the following leakage rates:

• 71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia”
• 33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation”
• 13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” (physical abuse of minors)
• 36% of “Leading minors off platform” (i.e., to illicit content off the TikTok platform)
• 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”
• 100% of “Fetishizing Minors.”

For every 100 videos trying to normalize pedophilia, 35 got through the content filters! For every 100 videos featuring a minor being sexually solicited, 33 got through! But we’re not dealing in hundreds; we’re dealing in millions! This is unconscionable. And TikTok knew. They knew all of it. They still know all of it.

Documents also show that they knew underage streamers were receiving digital currency on their app in exchange for stripping. In fact, these documents show “a high” number of these incidences. In fact, in one month TikTok documents show that one million “gifts” were sent to kids for such illicit purposes. TikTok knew.

If they knew all of this and took no meaningful action to protect children (or adults), do we really think anything will move them to do it? Surely not. Social media companies don’t care about your kids. And they don’t care about you. To them, you and your children are users. What they care about is producing the most addictive drug possible to keep their users hooked and dependent. They’ve duped us long enough. It’s time for us to take control. It’s time for us to rescue our kids. It’s time for us to break free.

Armed With What We Know, We Must Take Action

I’ll offer a few suggestions. You can decide how serious you want to get. I’ll warn you up front, though, this won’t be easy. You shouldn’t expect it to be.

Delay, Delay, Delay!

Delay giving your children a smartphone as long as possible. Every year you wait is one more year their brains have to mature, one more year they gain an identity apart from social media, one more year they have to develop executive function, emotional regulation, and a realistic assessment of reality, one more year they have to develop a robust and active imagination, one more year they have to look people in the eye, one more year they have to form meaningful, embodied, three-dimensional relationships.

Consider A Phone That Blocks All Social Media

Pinwheel and Gabb offer smartphones that block social media. My family has recently purchased a Pinwheel phone. It’s a smartphone that allows a suite of approved apps (including Life360 and Spotify), blocks all social media, has no internet browser, and allows only approved individuals to text our child (and copies all conversation to our parent portal). It’s not as easy to setup as a normal smartphone and it requires an added subscription expense, but it allows us to moderate what content our child has access to and who has access to our child. We all spend money on a lot of things for our kids. This is one I’m happy to spend money on.

Prioritize Un-Pixelated, Three-Dimensional Activities

Review all the things TikTok (and all social media) steals from children (and adults) (meaningful connections with loved ones built on eye contact, the formation of analytical skills, contextual thinking, deep, in-person conversations, etc.) and give yourself to these things with gusto. Eat meals together as a family (if you’re single, find meaningful, in-person gatherings, especially ones centered around food). Read books. Read books with others. Talk about them. Get outside and enjoy creation. Play sports. Learn an instrument. Go to a concert. Acquire a new skill or hobby. Intentionally engage in at least one meaningful un-pixelated (i.e. no individualized screen involved) three-dimensional activity per week. In-person worship, fellowship, and Bible study is a great place to start! You can build from there.

The stakes are high for our kids and for us. TikTok knows. And now you know too. In fact, now we know. And we can work together. This is not a time for finger pointing or blaming. We’ve all been suckered. They’ve got a supercomputer pointed at our brains (and our children’s brains)! It’s not a fair fight. But now that we know better, we can do better together. Let us together work for a better future for our children and for our future.

[1] The fact that people using social media are called users should be eye-opening. The thing drug dealers know about their product is that the more addictive it is, the greater their profit potential. To be clear, the problem isn’t a company earning a profit; the problem is the company designing a product to be addictive so as to profit off its victims.

If you’d like to talk or if you would like Lutheran Family Service to present on this topic to your group or congregation, we have counselors and speakers available. Contact us today for scheduling.

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