Over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to speak to hundreds of people about the ideas in my book Digital Liturgies. Most of these speaking engagements have featured a Q/A time. One question in particular that has come up more than once is this:
Are there particular social media apps that, in your opinion, have zero positive effects, and should be avoided rather than used wisely?
This question pops up because Digital Liturgies is not, in fact, a call for Christians to totally disengage social media. When I present on its ideas, most people come away feeling a sense of urgency regarding wisdom and awareness with these technologies, but not a moral mandate to disengage. So I think this is a really good question; and, it turns out, I do give an answer:
TikTok.
TikTok is, in my view, a social media platform devoid of positive benefit. I do not mean by that that it is wholly evil or cannot be used except sinfully. Rather, I think TikTok simply lacks any merit as a platform and is only useful in the sense that it is passively entertaining. This is also how I would describe things like soap operas, professional wrestling, and the national hot dog eating contest. The difference, though, between TikTok and those things, is that TikTok is 1) addictive, 2) actively corrosive to thinking, and 3) marketed to and consumed by an enormous number of children.
Let’s take these in order
TikTok is addictive
You can search for per day usage statistics for social media apps on Google. Unfortunately, you’re going to get some variance in your results. But most of the numbers for TikTok suggest that the average user spends at least one hour per day on the app. That might sound underwhelming at first, but consider two facts. First, the average Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter user spends about 30 minutes per day on the app, so that’s at least suggestive that TikTok holds poeple onto its platform twice as long as those other apps. Second, TikTok’s content is incredibly short; the longest videos tend to be no more than 2 minutes, and most of the videos are less than a minute long. This means that if a user spends 60 minutes per day on TikTok, she is consuming an enormous amount of content in that 60 minutes.
There is a lot of skepticism in elite spaces around the idea of tech addiction. I imagine this is partly because social media integrates now almost completely into the regular person’s day, so the idea of being “addicted” to an app is almost archaic. But when TikTok-ers call their elected representatives and warn that if the app is banned they will be depressed and possibly suicidal, I don’t know what else you can call it.
TikTok is actively corrosive to thinking
Now, this is a bit unfair, because my book argues that all social media is corrosive to thinking. But TikTok is more naked and aggressive in this effect than other apps. For one thing, just an enormous amount of viral content on TikTok is simply nonsense. So much of it is absurd, in fact, that it has birthed an entire counter genre of online content where people debunk TikTok videos. Those videos—the debunking ones—are now the subject of academic studies.
What’s more, TikTok’s particular character seems to create a digital environment which rewards users whose content indulges in stupid or illogical conclusions. Some of this content is “harmlessly” stupid (if that is not an oxymoron), but much of it is not. Consider TikTok’s “mental health” genre, an absolute cesspool of junk science and aggressively vapid self-care tropes. The sheer volume of mental health content on TikTok, much of it useless and a nice chunk of it actively dangerous, is a big, big problem.
TikTok’s model punishes users who want to think carefully about what they’re listening to, and rewards users who are able to take huge, life-altering topics like mental health or religion and compact them into self-referential, 30-second bombs. The only virtue on TikTok is fame, the only foundational truth is the algorithm, and the only argument is the seizing of attention.
TikTok is being marketed to and consumed by children.
In a post that is about much more than this,
captures an astonishing statistic: 30% of kids aged 5-7 are on TikTok. It’s hard to coherently articulate just how insane that is. Obviously there are the content concerns, but beyond that, there is simply no redemptive side to millions of children being immersed in TikTok’s attention-harvesting habitat. If you turned on PBS and left your kid in front of it for 8 hours, that would be bad parenting, but your child would at least be able to make some kind of sense out of what he saw (“I liked Peppa Pig. Antiques roadshow was confusing!”).TikTok is epistemological cocaine. No, actually, it’s an epistemological cocaine vending machine. And there does not appear to be any sense of urgency at TikTok to preventing kids from being able to walk up and put a quarter in. Again, I’m not ignorant that much of this critique applies to other apps. But TikTok’s particular nature means that the kids on the app are being dosed in a way that’s unique. Its addictive and anti-thought tendencies just mow over a child in a way that few other technologies can.
This leads to a final point. When Christians argue about the merits of particular social media, someone usually makes the case that believers need to be present on these apps in order to spread truth or help those on the app encounter Jesus. Without trying to sound too legalistic, let me say this: The gospel has, does, and will continue to call people not just out of their old ways of thinking and believing, but also their old ways of living and doing.
If what I’ve said about TikTok in this post is true, it is very likely that one of the implications of becoming a disicple of Jesus is that you redirect your attention away from things that captivate it cheaply and addictively. The question is not, “Can people on TikTok believe the gospel?” Of course they can. The question is, can the message of the church survive TikTok’s imprint on it? Maybe it can. I just don’t know what will happen while we wait to see.
Let’s keep going with the cocaine analogy. You don’t reach an audience on TikTok without participating in cocaine production. Who wants to make the argument that Christians should be synthesizing meth so they can reach the destitute meth addicts?
So glad I have never used TikTok! And one cannot forget the link to the Chinese government as well. I am reluctantly on WhatsApp, to communicate to godchildren, but otherwise avoid these things like the plague!