A bill that would effectively ban the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week in a 50-0 vote and was passed by the entire House in a largely bipartisan 352-65 vote on Wednesday. According to the legislation, the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would have to divest from TikTok or face a ban in the United States.
While the bill does have its detractors, such as Tesla owner Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and the American people are split on support for a ban, the bill is expected to pass with sizable bipartisan support.
Social media accounts like Libs of TikTok have documented the proliferation of far-Left gender and racial ideology on the platform for years now, and even top government officials have warned of the danger the app poses to national security because of its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the CCP aims to “exploit perceived U.S. societal divisions” through social media. The report added that “China is demonstrating a higher degree of sophistication in its influence activity, including experimenting with generative AI. TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”
While the app is a useful vector for both American leftists and Chinese communists to spread corrosive propaganda, the platform itself is just as dangerous to the minds of American citizens as the content posted to it. Studies have consistently reported that TikTok use poses a potentially disastrous threat to users’ memory, attention span, and mental health.
It should be emphasized how astronomically popular this social media platform is in the United States. By some estimates, TikTok boasts nearly 150 million monthly users in the U.S. — nearly half of the country’s population. American teenagers are especially hooked on the video-sharing app, with 67% of teens saying that they have used it and 16% reporting they use it “almost constantly,” according to The Guardian. The average teen user spends an hour-and-a-half on it every single day, according to a Gallup poll conducted in 2023.
TikTok’s algorithm meticulously tailors video recommendations to users’ past viewing habits and preferences, causing some to remark that the app’s ability to cater to their own personal tastes borders on uncanny, a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) investigation found in 2021.
This constant prolonged exposure to TikTok’s content strategy — barraging users with heavily curated short-form content — is having a detrimental impact on their cognitive abilities.
Specifically, the app’s algorithm preys on the human brain’s reward system, which releases the chemical dopamine whenever we experience something enjoyable in order to incentivize further consumption. Dopamine is released in a variety of situations in which humans feel pleasure or satisfaction, from petting a dog to taking drugs, but TikTok’s algorithm can create a “dopamine machine” that can cause people to become more easily addicted to it, pediatrician John Hutton told the WSJ in 2022.
It can also train a user’s brain to become accustomed to and seek out shorter content to get quicker hits of dopamine. A study from as early as 2019 suggested that attention spans are narrowing due in part to how quickly people consume information and content on social media. So, a user’s brain can become addicted to the format (the 15-second TikTok video) in which content is presented to you as well as the content itself (a video of a dog doing a backflip).
If someone’s brain become sufficiently addicted to the short-form content, then that can affect how well they can process information from a longer form source such as a news article, TV program, or a book. This can be especially disastrous for children, whose brains are still developing. The term “TikTok brain” was coined to describe the phenomenon in which children consume so much short content on apps like TikTok that they struggle to engage with anything that requires a greater degree of focus or attention.
“It is hard to look at increasing trends in media consumption of all types, media multitasking and rates of ADHD in young people and not conclude that there is a decrease in their attention span,” psychiatrist Carl Marci told the WSJ.
“When kids spend a lot of time watching short videos, they expect to continually be stimulated by fast changes in content,” says Professor Gloria Mark also told the publication.
In addition to harming their cognitive development, apps like TikTok wreak havoc on young people’s mental health. Multiple studies have found that addictive social media use has contributed to the spike in mental health problems among younger Americans.
TikTok’s content strategy is so successful that other platforms, such as YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, have scrambled to adopt a similar format, exposing even more people to the potentially harmful “dopamine machine.”
An oft overlooked but critical detail to mention about the Chinese-controlled app is that the American version is already functionally banned — in China. Douyin, TikTok’s counterpart in China, is devoid of the Left-wing gender and race ideology that pervades TikTok, largely thanks to China’s strict censorship regime. The algorithm in China instead focuses on pushing educational content as well as product advertisements, while suppressing any potentially inconvenient political topics (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre perpetrated by the CCP is nowhere to be found on the app).
What’s more, the Chinese version implements rigorous constraints on how young people can use it. Children younger than 14 can only have access to what the CCP deems child-friendly content and can only use it for 40 minutes every day. They are completely barred from the app from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., according to CNN.
A study on Douyin’s effect on users published in 2021 found that even that highly regulated and censored version of the app still activated areas of users’ brains associated with addiction, the WSJ noted.
The content peddled by TikTok is certainly harmful. Millions of teens have been exposed to radical gender and race ideology through TikTok videos. But the medium itself is also damaging Americans’ minds through its highly addictive and brain-altering algorithm, shortening their attention spans and disincentivizing complex thought. Unless there is a significant change to the format of TikTok and similar apps, its ownership by a hostile foreign government is only one part of the danger it poses to the American public.