Tik Tok, or what was originally Musical.ly may have started as an innocent video-sharing, and communication platform, however, it has always been deeply flawed. Obviously, any company located in Chinese territory is subject to their laws and will, and China has taken advantage of this opportunity, as any coherent, corrupt government would. Not only do we have governmental connections to point to when examining the damage TikTok has caused, but the destruction of modern American culture and teenagers, sucked into the rabbit hole of the wild, degenerate stupidity TikTok spews out in their faces. I’m proud to say I’ve never owned a TikTok account. I’m proud to say the idea of the rapid visual stimulation app owned by a Chinese tech giant has never sat well with me, even in my elementary school years. Despite the awkward moments on my school playground, where all my friends were neurotically gyrating to the newest trend and I was standing there waiting for them to start doing something I actually could join in on, I’m glad I was never allowed to indulge in the shallow, mind-numbingness of TikTok. And when you delete it, you won’t miss it either. During my research for this piece, I decided to spend some time on Douyin, TikTok’s sister company, out of plain curiosity as to what the differences are. Here are a few ways I found how Chinese controlled TikTok is turning the growing generation into zombies, and subsequently, corrupting the future of America. 

The Chinese Communist Party is bad. We all know that. But one thing crucial to winning the battle between conflicting values is noticing the other side’s strengths, and learning how to emulate them on our side. China is coherent. Not only do they have a leader that can string together more than two sentences that make sense, but they know what narrative to push and how to push it. When on Douyin, an app with 600 million daily users residing exclusively in China, I searched up different keywords that allude to topics I suspected may be seen as sensitive to the Chinese government. When “Joe Biden” was entered into the engine, almost every search result I scrolled through (about the top 50), called him “Sleepy Joe”. Douyin clearly knows what it’s doing. It’s not a matter of Tik Tok being all over the place in terms of rhetoric, there are inherent differences when discussing censorship on both platforms. One being that Chinese citizens are already trained to self-censor in fear of a decrease in their social credit score, while Americans are less likely to do so. However, t's the fact that Douyin will openly ban people, and topics from their website, while TikTok would rather silently shadow-ban, and hide content from the regular user. Compared to the seemingly endless drags on Sleepy Joe, when I typed “Xi Jinping'' into the engine, only two results showed, both being from one news account simply explaining Jinping addressing the Communist Youth League, and a meeting he had with Joe Biden concerning the two countries relations. Moreover, when I typed “Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh” I got a blank screen claiming “No Search Results”.  American TikTok is corrupting the values of teens by feeding them almost everything they want. Only some representation of the other side is allowed due to secret censorship, but even that is overpowered by degeneracy both American and Chinese higher ups would like to confuse Gen-Z with. 

On the other hand, let’s switch over to the cultural aspects, focusing more on the teens than the content itself. Douyin’s maximum video length comes in at a whopping ten minutes, however, you can upload videos not made on the platform that are already sitting in your camera roll with durations way longer than that. China knows that short form content destroys the attention span, which would be detrimental to a student's highly valued performance in school. The maximum length of a video you can upload to TikTok is 3 minutes. If China has as much control over the company as many officials think it does, it is safe to assume they know exactly what they’re doing in influencing every aspect of the grasp they have over the Gen-Zers, which make up about 50% of the user base. Additionally, not only are users’ habits being interrupted, but their personalities are too. The hours that are being spent on screens a day take away from hobbies that teenage victims could be experimenting with. Ask any average teen what hobbies they have outside of school and screens, and you won't find they’re interested in much else. Douyin has a mandatory 40 minute time limit on users younger than 14, allowing them time to find other things to do, in hopes of those hobbies carrying into their later years. In America, a measly 60 minute optional time limit is the default, which can easily be bypassed by a simple settings change. 

TikTok is destroying the teenage culture in the name of Chinese competition. If you disagree, instead of trying to find arguments against my claims, first look inward, and consider why you defend the tech giant in the first place. Is it because you don’t want to face the reality that you spend too much time on it, and possibly don’t have much else going for you? Or maybe you like when your kids are quiet, and, therefore staring at a screen 24/7. Whatever the reason may be, it’s important to identify it first before going further in your argument.