Tik Tok, a suspicious app:

(article produced when studying journalism at Edinburgh Napier University)

On Monday the 2nd of November 2020, BBC Panorama screened a 30 minute documentary about Tik Tok, the famous Chinese application. More than 500 million people allegedly over 13 years-old use Tik Tok all over the world. The BBBC movie is a thorough investigation about children's safety regarding this app. By interviewing users, but also experts and doing experiences to try to discover the truth behind the app’s safety center, the documentary underlines the dangers of Tik Tok. Indeed the documentary focuses on shocking and violent contents, sexualisation of young girls, paedophilia.

During lockdown, there has been a significant increase in the use of social media. Among other apps, Tik Tok has become an easy way for teenagers to entertain themselves. We saw a growing addiction phenomenon. A 16 years-old teenager admits that she would spend more than seven hours a day scrolling through the videos on her screen.

Throughout the documentary, the journalist gives some examples of the main guidelines of TikTok’s charter. In doing so, she proves that the app does not provide any proper safety to protect young users.

One of the striking sequences of this investigation that we can underline is the experience made by a graduate 23 years-old journalist. She pretended that she was a 13 years-old student using Tik Tok. She published several videos of her wearing a school uniform. As a result, she received messages from older men asking her private questions. It explicitly demonstrates the danger for young girls to be on the app, and how they can be approached by malicious men. In their guidelines, Tik Tok guarantee that they always act immediately, deleting the account of people who have been signalled. In reality, they don’t act as fast as they say, to protect the young girls from predators.

Eventually, the documentary highlights the aspect of physical comparison. Indeed, young teenagers on TikTok can easily compare themselves to other users, and as a result, can become the victim of eating disorder. A user denounced this through a video posted on the app. TikTok rapidly deleted it. Thus, it points up the hypocrisy of the app which ensures safety but all in deleting the healthy messages to alert users.

Thanks to this BBC Panorama documentary, we can conclude that TikTok pretends to care about their users, but in reality these statements are not respected and applied.

The documentary is short but very helpful in stressing the main dangers that we have to be informed about. Many parents have no idea of the risks for their children to have a Tik Tok account.