Very informative, thank you Simon
17 June 2025
Police leaders and teachers' unions are warning that TikTok frenzies that encourage anti-social behaviour are putting a strain on public services.
It comes after the BBC revealed how disproportionate engagement driven by TikTok was linked to disruption.
The BBC found four recent examples, including public interference in the police investigation of Nicola Bulley's disappearance and school vandalism.
'Toward the end of 2022, 8.8 million people watched a TikTok in which a young woman warned viewers: “Stop sleeping on your stomach/side or your face will droop.” One tweeted response to the video later earned more than 6,000 likes. It reads: “[It’s] terrifying that the anti-aging industry has wormed its way into younger and younger audiences. Teenage girls shouldn’t have to feel constantly terrified that everything they do is causing their face to look older.”'
Beauty filters like TikTok's new Bold Glamour can transform people's appearance, and the technology is now strikingly seamless. What can research tell us about the psychological consequences?
Dakota Fink didn’t mean to spread a lie. Honestly, she didn’t.
It was May 2021 and the 23-year-old LA-based model was wearing a face mask. “I was thinking I needed to be more involved with TikTok,” she says. So she decided to record a video as a joke: She’d pull off the flesh-coloured face mask on camera, and subtitle it with a claim that women had to peel layers of their skin off after their period.
But assertions that Tate’s rise is a product of today’s young men and their views are wrong. In fact, Tate repeatedly failed to build a personal brand until TikTok gave him the means to saturate news feeds.
Archives of his website show that his business and his pitch to young men was the same four years ago as it is today. As far back as 2019, his website promised courses that would “have your girlfriend obey every command”.
So if Tate’s ambitions and pitch to young men have stayed the same, what changed? The answer lies in how Tate learned to game TikTok’s algorithm, allowing his content to flood millions of news feeds.
Information from Ineqe
TikTok has released a new (but familiar!) feature within their app called ‘TikTok Now’. Our online safety experts have taken a look to assess what TikTok Now is, the safeguarding concerns that come with it, and the comparisons it has to the popular photo sharing app BeReal.
Comments
make a comment