Sequestered among wildflower meadows in Cheshire is Delamere, a private rehabilitation clinic whose guests are most commonly treated for drug and alcohol addiction. But lately the admissions team has noticed an increased number of calls from parents who are, in the words of one staff member, “concerned about how little sleep their son or daughter is getting because they’re scrolling through TikTok until the early hours”. Other parents who called the switchboard said that “even when [their children] are present, they’re vacant or distracted: locked to their phones at mealtimes and family events”.
At the UK Addiction Treatment Group, a network of rehab centres across the UK, there has been a sharp rise over the past six months in similar enquiries from parents concerned about their children’s dependence on social media, with the group’s treatment consultant citing TikTok as “especially addictive”. Some users complain of cognitive decline and decreased attention spans, a phenomenon known as “TikTok brain”.
Academics and technology ethicists have pointed to the Chinese app’s design as having greater addiction potential compared with others, not least its infinite scroll format, short videos (some only 15 seconds long) and full-screen display that spark hit after hit of dopamine in viewers, causing them to repeatedly seek out the same high.
Yet while Britain and most of the rest of the free world gorges on the app, ByteDance is prohibited from making TikTok available in China, where addictive algorithms are against the law. Last year, in a world first, its internet watchdog made it mandatory for domestic companies to give users the choice to opt out of their data being used for personalised content.
Meanwhile, when children aged between eight and twelve were offered a choice of five career options, those in the UK most wanted to be social media video stars while those in China said they most wanted to be astronauts. Does China know something we don’t?
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For the majority of its impressionable young consumers around the world, TikTok is a sugar rush: high in E-numbers and low in nutrition. Conversely, thanks to Chinese algorithm laws, the country’s own version of TikTok, Douyin, is the equivalent of a daily portion of leafy green vegetables.
“It’s almost like they recognise that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok,” said Tristan Harris, a technology ethicist and former Google worker, on America’s 60 Minutes last year.
Unlike TikTok, Douyin gives the option to switch off personalised content and has had “anti-addiction” measures in place for more than three years. When Douyin users in “youth mode” spend too long on the app, a five-second pause is triggered and videos urge them to “put down the phone”, “go to bed” and “work tomorrow”. In addition, time on the app is capped at a maximum of 40 minutes, it is physically unavailable between 10pm and 6am, and comes with a blue light-blocking facility it is claimed will help with healthy sleep patterns.
There are also marked differences between the content available on Douyin and TikTok. TikTok’s bread and butter is lip-syncing and inane influencers. A blackout challenge that appeared on the app reportedly led to the asphyxiation of several children. Other challenges involve drinking copious amounts of medicine, sticking pennies into sockets and licking toilets.
But on Douyin, influencers, and certainly scantily-clad women in enviable locations, are banned, and youth content must be educational. The platform has invested in “young intellectual creators” who make accessible science videos about anything from quantum physics to string theory and chemistry.
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Information on Douyin is tailored across the platform for different age groups and learning stages, with plans to curate learning “seasons” around such themes as animation, culture and parent-child. Douyin’s “Mengzi Plan”, named after a Confucian philosopher, also cross-pollinates with the offline world to include lectures and children’s events in planetariums, museums and aquariums.
Last week, whether by conscience or under corporate pressure, TikTok announced that it would introduce a 60-minute daily screen-time limit for users under 18, with the ability to set daily and weekly targets. A prompt will notify users after they spend an hour on the app, giving them the option to stop. A spokesman told The Sunday Times that “we care deeply about the safety of our community, particularly teens”. He said: “The ‘blackout challenge’ predates TikTok and it has never found any evidence of this type of content trending on its platform.” TikTok highlighted its wellbeing and safety resources, and its parental controls via Family Pairing tools on the app.
But some say the measures are not stringent enough. On the new screen limit, for example, 13 to 17-year-olds can simply enter a code to bypass the limit and keep viewing. In 2021 TikTok stopped push notifications after 9pm for 13 to 15-year-olds and after 10pm for 16 to 17-year-olds, but there is little information on how often these are bypassed.
“TikTok has won the race for the hearts and minds of 14 to 24-year-olds in the United States and the United Kingdom,” Imran Ahmed of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate told the BBC last week in response to TikTok’s screen time announcement. “It is the crack cocaine of algorithms. It is the most addictive, it is the most dangerous, and is the one that needs to be dealt with most urgently.”
With at least four billion global downloads of the app to date — half the planet’s population — the short-form video platform has already changed the world since its launch five years ago. TikTok dictates which songs enter the music charts, which fashion trends are followed and which books top bestseller lists. Members of Gen Z often turn to their favourite TikTok doctor rather than seek formal health advice, while new parents consult #mumlife videos for guidance on raising children. There is a hashtag for every topic or profession, from the perennially popular #dogs (379.6 billion views) and #harrypotter (128.6 billion) to the niche worlds of religious life (#nuntok, 32.1 million) and fantasy (#goblincore, 1.5 billion).
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The result is the first Big Tech success story to emerge from China: TikTok is valued at £41.7 billion, leaving Silicon Valley scrambling in its wake. There are more than 17.5 million TikTok users in the UK, 68 per cent of them aged under 25. Daily usage among teens rose from an average of 70 minutes a day in 2020 to 112 minutes in 2021.
But there is an elephant in the room ... or rather a big red dragon.
Many national security officials regard TikTok as a time bomb, not least because a member of the Chinese Communist Party sits on one of three seats of the board of Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd, a subsidiary of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. The CCP has a 1 per cent stake in the same subsidiary. A spokesman for TikTok said that Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd “has no visibility or control over any other global business including TikTok”. Chinese firms are legally obliged to pass any data they hold on to the government if requested, in order to aid intelligence-gathering on foreign and domestic targets. As a result, beneath TikTok’s surface of viral dance challenges, rollicking memes and cupcake recipes, geopolitically tectonic shifts are under way.
TikTok certainly collects a lot of data, including “keystrokes” and what people copy and paste on their phones and tablets, even when not on the app. In the US, it can harvest biometric data such as “face prints” and “voice prints” from uploaded videos. Less is known about how that all feeds into its apparently mind-reading algorithm. TikTok’s “For You” page spoon-feeds viewers with eerily specific, personalised content. A TikTok spokesperson said: “TikTok uses keystroke pattern recognition to identify malicious actors (like bots), without capturing the content of what is being typed.” The spokesperson added: “TikTok collects and uses facial, body or voice information for filters, effects and for safety, not to identify unique individuals.”
Ireland is currently carrying out two investigations into TikTok on behalf of the European Union, one into data transfers to China, another on child safety. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is wrapping up a three-year national security investigation that could see US TikTok being wrenched from its Chinese parent or even banned nationwide. The CFIUS probe was launched following concerns over political censorship by China in America, as well as the transfer of sensitive data back to the motherland.
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Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok entirely in 2020 but was thwarted by the Biden White House, which revoked his orders the following year. Now, however, the committee’s findings may confront Biden with the unenviable choice of either tackling a conspicuous national security threat or alienating 80 million young voters. Initial efforts to ban TikTok on US university campuses have been met with student outrage and flat-out refusal to comply. As every parent knows, if there is any force more powerful than state committees and international treaties, it’s wilful youth and peer pressure.
That said, more than half of US states have already banned TikTok from official government devices, and last Monday the White House extended the ban to all government agencies, giving them 30 days to remove the app from their phones. The next day both Canada and the European parliament followed, the European Commission and the European Council having already banned TikTok on staff devices a week earlier. On Friday, Germany forbade officials from downloading the app. India is even more strident, having prohibited TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020.
Where does the UK stand? Michelle Donelan, the new science, innovation and technology secretary, said last Monday that “we have no evidence to suggest a necessity to ban people from using TikTok”. Britain will not be following Brussels or Washington in banishing the platform from government devices, she told Politico. “That would be a very, very forthright move, it would require a significant evidence base to be able to do that.”
On her way to No 10, Liz Truss vowed to crack down on TikTok (a pledge unrelated to her runaway success as a TikTok meme: Gen Z relentlessly mocked her awkward speeches and #LizTruss currently boasts an impressive 991 million views). But the current state of play is that Rishi Sunak is resisting a ban, leaving Britain at risk of “being marooned as a tech security laggard among free and open nations” on the issue, according to Alicia Kearns, who chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee.
The worry may not turn out to be what TikTok and China are doing with our data now, but what they might do with it in the future. It is not beyond the realms of plausibility that China could one day in vade Taiwan in the same way Russia invaded Ukraine. Then there would be the grim prospect that a hostile power would have access to the little computers in everyone’s pockets.
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How, exactly, does TikTok know so much about us? While we wait for answers, should the West be more cautious? Should we, in fact, be more like China?
Update: This article was amended on March 10, 2023 to include further comment from TikTok and to make clear that Douyin is a separate entity to TikTok; that TikTok stopped push notifications for teenagers after a certain time at night in 2021 not 2022; to correct the name of a subsidiary of TikTok’s parent company to Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd.
