Social Media App TikTok Impacting Youth's Influence
In the digital age, social media platforms like TikTok have become a significant part of young people's lives. However, a growing concern surrounds the impact of TikTok's algorithm on the brains of children and adolescents, leading to addictive behaviours and potential negative mental health outcomes.
TikTok leverages the human brain's reflexive attention mechanism, using dance videos and other stimuli to captivate users. This mechanism, which causes us to focus on movements, sound, and light in our environment, is easier for children to be influenced by than adults. The platform's algorithm, designed to promote content based on views, likes, comments, and time spent viewing videos, contributes to addictive behaviour primarily by leveraging sophisticated AI-driven personalized content recommendations that exploit the brain's reward system through dopamine release.
Key aspects of TikTok's algorithm that foster addiction include the infinite scroll and autoplay features, which remove natural stopping cues, creating an "infinite engagement loop" that traps users in continuous content consumption without realizing how much time has passed. The personalized "For You" feed, generated by machine learning analysing thousands of data points such as watch time, pauses, and microexpressions, maximizes engagement by predicting and immediately serving content tailored to user interests, vulnerabilities, and pain points.
The delivery of variable rewards through unpredictable, highly engaging videos stimulates dopamine release in the brain, producing feelings of pleasure and craving to continue use. When users stop watching, dopamine levels drop, causing withdrawal-like feelings that push them to reopen the app. The design also exploits psychological patterns such as the sunk cost fallacy and the Zeigarnik effect, encouraging prolonged use and dependency.
Moreover, due to weak age verification and bypassable parental controls, children can easily access inappropriate or harmful videos, potentially exacerbating mental health issues including anxiety, depression, and self-harm behaviours. Internal TikTok employee disclosures and lawsuits have highlighted that the company's own staff warned that the app’s algorithm fuels compulsive use and poses risks to teenagers' mental health, yet the design and recommendation system persist in reinforcing addictive usage patterns.
The European Commission has launched an investigation into TikTok's impact on the brains of children and adolescents. The investigation is looking into the techniques used by TikTok to capture and retain its users. The article suggests an interview with producer Guillaume Combastet about children, parents, and screens, titled "What if we looked up?"
It's essential to understand how these platforms work and identify what makes children and adolescents return to them and spend so much time on them. It's also important to educate young people about the digital world and provide them with keys to regain control of their online habits. Repeated doses of dopamine from TikTok can lead to a lack of motivation and may negatively impact productivity, sleep, and attention. The short video duration exacerbates the zapping effect, potentially weakening young users' ability to concentrate.
In conclusion, TikTok's algorithm is engineered to deeply engage users by continuously feeding personalized, dopamine-triggering content without natural breaks, leading to compulsive behaviours and increasing the risk of addictive use and negative mental health outcomes among children and adolescents. This effect combines advanced AI with psychological manipulation tactics well documented in addiction science.
