Recently I have seen a lot of videos of young girls on TikTok participating in certain dance and fashion trends. When I was in elementary and middle school, I was busy collecting silly bands and focusing on managing my fan page for the YouTube channel, Our2ndLife. I feel as if TikTok is meant for and targeted toward the older part of Gen Z. The reason I say this is because the types of dances and fashion trends are often not appropriate for younger teenagers. A lot of the dances involve twerking or include explicit lyrics with implied meanings. Even if young girls are doing a dance that isn’t sexual, they still manage to get sexualized by predators on the app.
Old men on TikTok often comment creepy things on these young girls’ videos and sometimes even end up direct messaging them with inappropriate messages. What can TikTok do about this? What can we do about this? For starters, parents need to be more in control of what their children do on their devices. This is hard for us to control obviously, since we are not these childrens’ parents. I feel like there should be more awareness and campaigning around these specific dangers of social media, so parents can take the proper steps to protect their young teens. A lot of these parents do not understand how social media works, let alone TikTok. If they knew about the lack of supervision on this app, they most likely would not let their kids have it.
Another solution to this problem is TikTok becoming more strict with their violations. TikTok will take down videos that are not even inappropriate, yet they leave up some really disturbing and violent content. If they see a video of a clearly very young girl participating in an inappropriate dance trend and there are pedophilic comments, they should take the video down. It is unfortunate that young girls cannot post videos without these creeps sexualizing them, but that is the world we live in. TikTok should also ban users who are clearly very old and making pedophilic comments, although in reality, this is hard. Many of these users are anonymous, they have no profile picture and a username not containing their real name. This problem is extremely difficult to control, but I believe we can start making change with the parents and through education.
If parents or potential parents are able to learn about the dangers of TikTok, they can either completely restrict their child from using the app, make them have a private account, or heavily regulate what they post. We can only combat this ongoing issue if we all work together and make this problem more known. TikTok also needs to do their part by reforming the app and their guidelines. If we educate and campaign together, maybe this issue will become more widely known, and TikTok will finally listen to our concerns.