TikTok and the revolt of Gen Z

We can be mad at Congress for attempting this ban without pretending the app is purely a force for social good

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When I logged onto TikTok for the first time this morning—which was, as usual, a little too soon after first becoming conscious—my FYP was flooded with content on yesterday’s congressional hearing about banning the app in the US. There were jokes about how breathtakingly stupid so many of these congresspeople are; thirst traps of the CEO, who withstood hours of infantilizing and racist questioning; and, perhaps most of all, hundreds of millions of views’ worth of frustration at the sheer hypocrisy of our billionaire overlords, who are hellbent on banning TikTok “for the sake of the children”—instead of addressing the vast array of factors contributing to the fact that child and teen mortality rates in the US have just experienced their highest increase in decades.

That’s according to an editorial published in the Journal of of the American Medical Association this month, titled The New Crisis of Increasing All-Cause Mortality in US Children and Adolescents. The research is based on new detailed examinations by the CDC of death certificate data, which found that child and adolescent mortality rates in the United States rose by 20% between 2019 and 2021, the largest increase in at least 50 years.

“This increase in all-cause pediatric mortality has ominous implications,” the authors write. “A nation that begins losing its most cherished population—its children—faces a crisis like no other.”

The reasons for this ghastly increase in the deaths of babies, teenagers and children in the wealthiest country that has ever existed on earth? Researchers identified four primary injury-related reasons for the jump: an increase in deaths from cars, suicides (particularly by gun), homicide (almost exclusively by gun), and accidental drug overdoses. Other contributing factors include Americans paying more for healthcare than any other wealthy nation while getting worse standards of care, Black mothers and infants dying during or soon after childbirth at much higher rates than their white counterparts, and, after the expiration of the Child Tax Credit, millions of children plunging into poverty.

A new study out of the UK this year found that both the UK and the US lag far behind other wealthy nations when it comes to life expectancy across the board, including for children.

We are dying. Children—children!—are dying. And not only are the million year old cretins in Congress trying to ban young people’s favorite app; they’re also refusing to do anything about the billion-dollar pharmaceutical, motor vehicle and gun industries profiting off all this death and destruction. And purely anecdotal evidence (my For You page, and perhaps yours) suggests that Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the oldest of whom turned 13 this year, are increasingly aware of how profoundly out of touch politicians are on both sides of the aisle, how little those in power are doing to help them deal with the opioid epidemic, climate disaster, skyrocketing costs of living, crumbling infrastructure, the youth mental health crisis, or anything else they care deeply about, and—perhaps most importantly—why those in power are trying to distract us with made-up bullshit instead of actually dealing with the issues that are literally killing their constituents: because it benefits them to do so. Because their biggest interests aren’t serving the public good, but accumulating more money and power.

“Everybody knows what TikTok is,” committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said at the beginning of yesterday’s grisly proceedings. “It’s too dangerous to be on our phones as members of Congress. In my judgment, it’s too dangerous to be on our children’s phones. That’s the whole point of this bill.”

McCaul also happens to have invested at least $200k in shares in Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which as of last month Capitol Trade estimates has earned him over 70% on the investment. (McCaul previously dumped tens of thousands of worth of stock in the company last fall, a convenient two weeks before Meta took a massive nosedive.) McCaul isn’t alone; congresspeople own many millions of dollars in Meta stock, which, along with Snapchat, jumped following the hearing, in anticipation of TikTok’s demise. Insider Market called it “a disaster moment” for the app’s future prospects in the US. "Could not have gone worse,” said the FCC commissioner.

New York Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) was one of precious few Congresspeople to speak some sense about the topic, posting a video to his own TikTok account before the hearing praising the app for creating community, promoting free speech (on which the ACLU agrees with him; the nonprofit thinks the ban would be unconstitutional), aiding millions of small businesses, and allowing young people to talk about their mental health and feel less alone. “Why the hysteria and the panic and the targeting of TikTok?” Bowman asks. He notes that Facebook, Instagram and YouTube also pose a threat to our privacy, and that targeting TikTok isn’t helpful when what we need is comprehensive federal legislation about all social media platforms if we have any hope of ever using them safely and securely. Of course, a single Congressperson is clamoring to ban Facebook, even though Meta’s already selling our data to companies in China, infamously handed over millions of people’s sensitive profile info to the Trump campaign, and has literally facilitated genocides.

Bowman is right to identify the TikTok hysteria as in part a product of fearmongering and xenophobia around China. It made me sick to see Congresspeople repeatedly mispronounce Shou Zi Chew’s name and chastise him like a child.

One of my favorite online personalities, LolOverruled, a public defense lawyer in New York City as well as a socialist and excellent shitposter, posted about the hearing today and addressed one of the committee’s other gotchas: that TikTok is somehow singularly evil and aggressive in pushing disinformation and fake news, rather than yet another social media company failing badly at the enormously tricky problem of content moderation. Multiple congresspeople accused TikTok of intentional propaganda, “as if you’re not [being propagandized] in every other facet of your life,” Lolo said, mentioning all the Marvel movies that are co-produced by our Department of Defense. But TikTok, something that helps millions of Americans make friends, earn a living, and access news and perspectives that are underreported or nonexistent in the mainstream media, is the problem.

A lot of young TikTokers seem to think that TikTok itself represents the masses, and that politicians are attempting to suppress the voice of the people. Some guy named Christopher Clafin, whose bio alleges people call him “TikTok Jesus,” got over a million views by ranting in his car about the ban while wearing a pair of insane Mad Max-ish sunglasses. “The first and most important reason” the government wants to take the app away from us, he said, is that “they do not want us talking to each other.”

These theories foregrounding suppression and dissent are, IMO, giving both the US government and TikTok itself far too much credit. TikTok might be unique in the breadth of its reach right now, allowing activists and organizers to spread news and information there, as well as organize and mobilize movements IRL, but social media sites, which rise and fall, aren’t the righteous promoters of free speech and democracy they often make themselves out to be.

“During the early days of the Arab uprisings, when many activists were using Facebook and Twitter to organise and amplify their demands, the social media giants seized the opportunity to brand themselves as platforms for political activism and resistance,” the Tunisian academic and writer Haythem Guesmi argued for Al Jazeera last year. “To this day, numerous media outlets run the claim that ‘social media made the Arab Spring’ and that it was a ‘Facebook revolution’. But social scientists have repeatedly busted this myth and have offered critical readings of the role these tech companies have played in the political unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, and other Arab countries.”

Gusemi cites studies that have found “there is no significant correlation between internet or social media use and popular unrest” and that “the ‘important story’ about the Arab Spring is not the use of social media technology, but how revolutionary aspirations resonated across the Arab world.” The myth that social media alone powered the uprisings is one way Big Tech is getting away with repressing activist speech and activity at the behest of foreign governments.

“Despite the large of number of campaigns and the alarming evidence that digital threats to democracy are getting more dangerous and widespread,” Gusemi goes on, “Big Tech companies continue to downplay their critical role in undermining democratic movements and free speech in the Arab world and ignore calls to implement urgent, long-term reforms. … this irresponsible profit-driven behaviour has led to the brutalisation of the digital public space, the extremist tribalisation of political discourse, and the incitement of political violence” across the Middle East and North Africa. The same can be said of social media’s affects on the disastrous political climate in the US and other countries around the world. Remember January 6th, when a bunch of Nazis organized on Facebook to overthrow the government?

I think we can be angry at Congress for trying to ban TikTok— while ignoring other sites’ huge privacy and moderation issues and fanning the flames of anti-Chinese xenophobia, all while they line their own pockets—without acting like TikTok is purely a force for social good. Context collapse is a classic problem on social media, where if two things or people or entities are in conflict, then one must be Good and the other Bad. But congress sucking doesn’t mean that TikTok, and all for-profit social media companies, does not also, in fact, suck.

Yes, so many millions of us have self-soothed and connected with others in truly life-sustaining ways on TikTok since the onset of the pandemic. But everything that’s wonderful about this app shouldn’t excuse it from all the ways it’s making us sick.

Writer and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff was among the first to point out, back in 2011, that if something is free online, then you, the consumer—the human being—are the product. Traditionally, social media has harvested us for data and sold intimate aspects of our lives to the highest bidder. Regardless of how TikTok is really using our data—its CEO insists that privacy and security is of top importance—what’s just as if not more important to its success is the app’s reliance on two precious and finite resources: our labor and our time. Other social media apps also rely on the human desire to seek oblivion via the endless scroll, on us spending many hours glued helplessly to our screens, but one of the ways in which TikTok is unique is how much more effort, more work, required to make videos than, say, firing off a 140-character tweet.

Some creators on TikTok are creative, funny or smart enough to just get in front of their camera, talk, post, and rake in the views. But for the rest of us hoping to promote our businesses, connect with others, create a community, whatever your goal is in growing a following, this shit takes a lot of work. Those who’ve managed to leverage their audience into brand deals notwithstanding, social media users are essentially unpaid gig workers. And it’s the companies that own them raking in billions of profit.

Even TikTok’s most ardent defenders will have to admit it has its dark sides, from the hate and abuse thrown at marginalized creators to the promotion of unrealistic and harmful body standards. The proximity social media forces us to have with one another also means we’re seeing the unhinged opinions of tens of thousands of people, every single day. As I’ve written before, social media algorithms amplify the most unhinged and dangerous takes so that people will reblog, retweet or stitch them, further amplifying poisonous ideas that harm our mental health while making more money off us all in the process.

We can have the benefits of TikTok, and so much more, without its many nightmarish aspects if all for-profit social media companies like it were abolished, and ad-free social media services built and run as public utilities were imagined in their wake. A digital public sphere that promotes innovation, solidarity, community and freedom is possible.

I’m very curious to see whether all the youth threatening on TikTok to delete Facebook and Instagram—the latter of which has seen an uptick in young users over recent years, having worked hard and spent harder to court them— will actually make good on these threats, whether or not TikTok does actually end up banned in the US. Meta’s aggressive lobbying has been hugely influential in getting Congresspeople whipped up about the prospect, and TikTokers are pissed. But financial analysts are predicting that most people will gravitate toward existing social media sites in the aftermath, thus the jump in Snapchat and Meta products’ stock. What would it really take to get people of all ages, en masse, to log off?

For now I’m still on TikTok and sort of on Instagram, rotting my brain away, bombarded with endless news streams promising social collapse and imminent doom. I, too, try to “spread awareness” of all the horrific shit we’re facing by meekly reposting news to my socials and sometimes going long in essays like this. But awareness isn’t enough, and never has been.

Thanks so much for reading. Hope you have a great weekend, and that you’re able to spend some time far, far away from your phone.

xxSK