In his brilliant pandemic-inspired comedy special “Inside,” Bo Burnham muses about our children’s use of social media.
“I don’t know about you guys, but, um, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that, that, you know, maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit,” Burnham says.
“You know, maybe that was, uh, a bad call by us. Maybe, maybe the, the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a, lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley, maybe that as a, as a way of life forever, maybe that’s, um, not good,” the comedian says.
So there’s that. Forget China’s nefarious intentions for a moment (and they are very real). TikTok is cocaine for the brain — and particularly dangerous for young minds. Kids crave acceptance and popularity, and one way to feed that beast is on social media.
Just like everyone else (TikTok says 1 billion people use the platform each month), I added the app to my phone when it came out. But occasionally, scrolling through the app, it seemed like an endless stream of young women dancing. Then I began seeing girls — young girls — mimicking women with their dancing and figured, yeah, no.
So I killed the app for that reason and one other: It’s a time suck. Just like Facebook (which I also killed), whenever I’d scroll through for five or 10 minutes, I’d wish I had that time back. A total waste.
But there’s so much more. And Scott Galloway — professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business and the author of “The Four, The Algebra of Happiness” — laid it out succinctly last week.
“We have, essentially with TikTok, the most powerful propaganda tool in history. “It’s the most extended platform in history, it’s gone from 600 million to 6 billion. And the wonderful thing about America is our optimism, but the Achilles heel of that is that we’re much easier to fool than convince we’ve been fooled,” Galloway said Friday on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.”
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Then he dropped a bomb: “The negativity around America is positively correlated with consumption of social media and TikTok. And you can’t lay this at the feet of all media or social media or TikTok, but we can say is it’s not incumbent upon us to prove that they’re not doing it, it’s incumbent upon them to prove that they’re not doing it.”
Galloway later took direct aim at China, long known for stealing intellectual property. He noted that China’s equivalent of TikTok focuses on children aspiring to be pianists and astronauts, while “our TikTok talks about income inequality and election misinformation.”
But some in Congress, like Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), say squashing TikTok would be “racist.”
“Why the hysteria and the panic and the targeting of TikTok?” Bowman said last week. “As we know, Republicans in particular, have been sounding the alarm, creating the red scare around China. … In terms of TikTok’s behavior and its risk to national security, it poses about the same threat that companies like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter pose,” Bowman claimed.
And that’s exactly the point. They’re all bad. Social media is bad for adults, but terrible for children.
“Maybe, maybe, we shouldn’t allow giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit,” Burnham says.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.