Children need to be protected from TikTok

TikTok is perpetuating significant harm to the welfare and wellbeing of young children.

This week, it was announced by the UK’s data protection authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), that they were handing down a £12.7 million fine to TikTok for significant breaches of data protection law. It is one of the largest fines to have ever been imposed by the body.

Having conducted a thorough investigation into TikTok, the ICO found that in 2020, up to 1.4 million UK children under the age of 13 were accessing and using its platform.  

The ICO found that personal data belonging to these children was used without parental consent. They also found that TikTok failed to adequately check who was using their platform and take sufficient action to remove underage children, even though they should have been aware that this was taking place.

Some may think that this is a dry, legal issue; only of concern to those who work in the field of data protection. In reality, this could not be further from the truth. The impact of TikTok’s breaches on children is seismic.  

As the Information Commissioner, John Edwards, has said:

‘When you sign up, you can be targeted for advertising, you can be profiled, your data contributes to an algorithm which feeds content.’

This means that people who use TikTok can find themselves in a position where their data is being tracked and then used. Depending on what content they have been watching, they will continue to be exposed to the same type of thing in future, often without consciously being aware of this process.

This is a well-known phenomenon in the world of data and most adults understand to some extent that it is taking place when they use social media. Some even welcome it, as it means they will receive content or adverts that are relevant to them.

However, when it comes to child safeguarding, the terrain could not be more different. Here, children can be exposed to more and more harmful content even though they don’t have the capacity to understand why the algorithm is feeding this to them. ‘If you’ve been looking at content which is not appropriate for your age, that can be more and more extreme,’ said John Edwards. This very clearly illustrates the slippery slope that children can find themselves on when using platforms such as TikTok.

Edwards goes on to state emphatically that: ‘it can be quite harmful for people who are not old enough to fully appreciate the implications and to make appropriate choices.’

Here are just some examples of the sorts of videos that children under the age of 13 may have been exposed to on TikTok over recent times.

They may have seen young people flashing their double mastectomy scars online, and telling them that life-altering surgery, or ‘cutting my titties off’, is something to aspire to. They could have been exposed to the videos of young people self-identifying as animals, or teachers boasting about offering students breast-binders at schools – a practice that can cause significant harm to a young person’s body. Other adults may have told them on the platform that puberty blockers are 100 per cent reversible and completely safe, despite the lack of long-term studies on these treatments. Teachers on TikTok have been seen encouraging children to hide the fact that they are socially transitioning from their parents, while also telling young children that they can be ‘born in the wrong body’. Other adults on the platform frequently say that some women have a penis and some men have a vagina; teach that biological men have periods; and instruct young people on how to use xe/xem pronouns. Or parents talk about how they knew their two-year-old boy was trans because he enjoyed wearing dresses.  

At the more extreme end, children may have come across activists on the platform blaming the recent Nashville shooting – in which six people were killed – on government legislation, rather than the person who committed this heinous crime. And they may have seen adults frequently make statements like ‘all white people are racist’. And deranged activists telling trans people to ‘resist’, ‘fight’, ‘hurt’ and ‘carry a weapon at all times.’

This content is clearly inappropriate and harmful to children of any age. The fact that there are children aged 13 and under may have been exposed to this material is beyond terrifying.

The few examples above only scratch the surface. Given that statistics show that over one billion videos are watched every day on TikTok and that the average user spends 95 minutes each day on the platform, we can only begin to imagine the horrors of what TikTok is doing to children’s brain development.

TikTok have enabled children to be exposed to content that they should never have been allowed to watch in the first place. Hopefully, the Online Safety Bill, which is due to be passed over the coming months, will introduce strict age verification processes for social media companies.

Parents too need to play a more active role in checking what platforms their children are using. While much of TikTok’s content may be silly and harmless videos of singing and dancing, what lurks below is much more sinister.  

However, the most terrifying thing of all is that TikTok only presents us with a snapshot of people’s lives and their inner world. Even if TikTok ceases to exist, there will still be teachers pushing gender ideology in schools. There will still be activists telling white children that they are inherently racist. And there will still be sexualised drag shows performed up and down the country.

If the content of TikTok even remotely resembles the reality of the modern world, I fear for the future of humanity.