With the Supreme Court set to hear arguments in TikTok v. Garland on Friday, President-elect Donald Trump recently asked the court to give him the opportunity to decide whether TikTok, the social media platform responsible for undermining the mental health of millions of impressionable children through its targeted algorithms, should be banned in the U.S. or divested from Chinese ownership.
The reasons to ban TikTok are plentiful, which is why overwhelming bipartisan majorities passed legislation last year to force owner ByteDance’s divestiture from the app or face a ban in the U.S. by Jan. 19. There are obvious national security risks to keeping TikTok around, which are outlined in a recent Advancing American Freedom amicus brief urging the court to uphold the ban. But perhaps even more sinister are TikTok’s harmful effects on children’s well-being.
For as long as it has existed, Chinese-controlled TikTok has insidiously exposed children and teenagers to the very worst sort of material: online content promoting suicide, extreme diets, distorted body images, and corrupt ideologies. A 2022 Center for Countering Digital Hate study found that TikTok accounts registered as 13-year-olds witnessed suicidal content within mere minutes of setting up their accounts. The CCDH report also found that TikTok recommended videos about body image and mental health every 39 seconds, using ads for medical procedures and weight-loss drinks as a means to undermine teens’ perception of their self-worth and body image. In total, research by Eko found that suicide-related content on TikTok has generated over 1.43 million posts and 8.8 billion views since the app’s launch.
The real-life consequences of TikTok must not be taken lightly. Teens, including 14-year-old Andie Duke, who developed an eating disorder from exposure to TikTok’s harmful dieting video reels, are being done a massive disservice by the platform’s recommendation loop. Duke noticed that “the more [she] interacted with those types of videos, the more they started to show up.” She spent hours watching videos focused on calorie counting, excessive exercise, curbing hunger, and ways to hide what she was doing from parents. Likewise, TikTok user Daisy Gonzalez lost nearly 100 pounds in one year due to seeing so much dieting content on the platform, causing her to develop gallstones and have her gallbladder removed.
The physical and mental anguish inflicted by TikTok extends far beyond dieting and suicide by telling children that they should question their biological sex and take steps to change it, surgically and hormonally. The app aggressively pushes gender and sexuality content to minors, even giving transgender influencers the ability to distribute puberty blockers and hormones to youth, all without parental consent. Some users even say TikTok’s algorithm identified their bisexuality before they did.
One such victim of TikTok’s push for gender confusion who has since detransitioned, Oli London, has spoken out about the inner turmoil he experienced after engaging with the app. He explains that the app heavily promotes double mastectomies to women and girls using the hashtag #topsurgery, which gained more than 2.1 billion views in 2023.
Parents should be terrified by just how pervasive TikTok’s influence is over the inner lives of their children and throughout our culture. In fact, TikTok is the most popular social media platform among children in the United States and globally. Tragically, 41% of American children spent more than two hours a day on the app in 2023, allowing TikTok to acquire $2 billion in ad revenue from its users aged 13 to 17.
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The good news is that parents and policymakers are waking up to these horrifying realities. In April 2024, 352 House members and 79 senators voted to block the Chinese-owned app from warping the minds and souls of our youth with destructive content. We all must continue to ensure that our lawmakers reinforce the timeless truth that children are best protected by those who love them most: parents and guardians.
China is attempting to harm the mental and physical health of American youth through TikTok’s dangerous algorithm. If TikTok is to continue to be available in app stores in the United States, it must be sold to a U.S. company free from toxic Chinese propaganda or else banned from use. The health and safety of our posterity depend on it.
Paul Teller is the executive vice president of Advancing American Freedom.