“After a few hours, I had to stop. If the rapid string of sad videos made me feel bad, how would a 14-year-old feel after watching this kind of content day after day? One account is dedicated to “sad and lonely” music. Another features a teenage girl crying in every video, with statements about suicide. One is full of videos filmed in a hospital room. Each of the hospital videos contains text expressing suicidal thoughts, including, “For my final trick I shall turn into a disappointment.”
Users have developed creative ways to skirt TikTok’s content filters. For instance, since TikTok won’t allow content referencing suicide, people use a sound-alike such as “sewerslide,” or just write “attempt” and leave the rest to the viewer’s imagination. Creators of videos about disordered eating have also evaded TikTok’s filters.
Policing all the content on a service used by more than one billion monthly users is no easy task. Yet there is a difference between stamping out harmful content and promoting it. “If tech companies can’t eliminate this from their platforms, don’t create algorithms that will point kids to that information,” said Arthur C. Evans Jr., chief executive of the American Psychological Association.”
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