TikTok too is getting in on the whole user safety thing. As such, TikTok has conducted a new study that takes a look at the proliferation of dangerous trends and challenges, with the intent of better understanding why young people choose to engage in such . TikTok decided for this new push so that it can also establish better policies to protect against related dangers.
Ove time, this too has become a key area of concern. Just last year, in Italy, a 10-year old girl died after taking part in what was called the ‘Blackout Challenge’, which led Italian authorities to force TikTok to block all accounts that failed to verify the user’s age. Another popular challenge was the ‘Milk Crate Challenge’, which also happened to trend earlier this year. The ‘Milk Crate Challenge’ caused many people to suffer serious injury as it basically had them trying to climb stacks of plastic crates. Other concerning trends include the ‘Benadryl Challenge’, ‘Full Face Wax’, the ‘Back Cracking Challenge’, and basically any other scenario that would involve doing otherwise very mundane tasks in extreme, unorthodox, and down right just unsafe ways. Just the thought of some of these ‘challenges’ is enough to cause brain damage.
I Challenge You!
Given TikTok’s ever growing reach and influence, while it can deliver hours worth of enjoyable and addictive content, it also clearly shows a major area of concern in terms of the focus it can give to otherwise just unsafe behavior and practices. This is exactly the reason why it’s important for TikTok to act where it can in order to limit potential harm.
TikTok’s study on harmful trends includes a sample size of 10,000 teens, parents, and teachers from different countries, giving it ample radius to glean insight from the various elements involved. From its data, TikTok commissioned independent safeguarding agency Praesidio Safeguarding to come up with a guideline to help improve its processes.
The overview points out that a majority of those undergoing the challenges don’t even feel like they’re participating in an unsafe practice which, although self-reported, is exactly why it’s concerning. A notion is formed that “as long as it’s from TikTok, it must be safe”, which totally goes against logical judgement. Furthermore, enforcement of safety protocols can be difficult, seeing as how basing on hashtags and raw descriptions alone limits identification. ‘Benadryl Challenge’ is likely to get the mod team’s attention, but ‘Milk Crate Challenge’ might not.
What’s more concerning, based on the gathered data, is the prevalence of ‘Self-Harm Hoaxes’, which, for some reason, have a knack of drawing great attention, despite the fact that such activities tend to highlight gradually escalating instances of people ‘pretending’ to hurt themselves. What’s worse, some actually believe these and end up doing the same things (or similar) for real. Things like the ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ or anything that features ‘Momo’ have the tendency to induce dangerous behavior in people. To emphasize, certain challenges on TikTok can be a very real threat to one’s psyche.
TikTok makes it a point to explain that:
“The research showed how warnings about self-harm hoaxes – even if shared with the best of intentions – can impact the well-being of teens. While we already remove and take action to limit the spread of hoaxes of this nature, to further protect our community we will start to remove alarmist warnings about them as they could cause harm by treating the self-harm hoax as real. We will continue to allow conversations to take place that seek to dispel panic and promote accurate information.”
The Wrap
TikTok is said to also be enlisting the help of adolescent health experts in order to develop new resources for its Safety Center, dedicated specifically towards unsafe challenges and hoaxes. TikTok is even updating the type of language it uses in its warning labels. On its meteoric rise to prominence, these are one of the things that can’t be avoided and are among the more difficult elements to predict and counter.
For some reason, whether or not it’s an innate human tendency, the prospect of undertaking and overcoming potentially dangerous and ‘life-threatening’ situations appeals to many, especially younger, more susceptible users. It’s good to see TikTok take such an active approach in combating a very concerning issue, but the fact that such things exist in the first place might forever be a mystery. It’s not so much as TikTok’s fault in amplifying the reach and spread of harmful challenges, as it is for people to actually “like” putting themselves in precarious situations in the name of online vanity and acknowledgement. Perhaps our parents were right all along – too much exposure to media can and will rot the brain. Literally.
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