Mum's the Word: 'I’m calling time on the Tik Tok app – it’s a bomb waiting to go off'

I THINK by now it is safe to say that most of us have heard of Tik Tok. I also think it is safe to say as parents many or most of us have been plagued by numerous requests from our children to get their own Tik Tok account — I know I sure have.

It feels as though this new(ish) video-sharing platform is just another online space for us to get our heads around. What is it exactly, what do kids seem to love about it, and is it safe? Tik Tok first came into our lives about six months ago when a local pal of my daughter Joan showed her her account.

The two of them watched it for a while and I could see Joan was instantly hooked. I asked the little girl if I could have a look and honestly, I felt dizzy after three seconds. It was just non-stop, short bursts of nothing, to me. Later that day I googled Tik Tok to read more about it and watched an online tutorial about how to set up and run an account.

I wanted to educate myself on it and to see if it was something we wanted to introduce into Joan’s life. I have to respect that online life is something kids eventually want and I don’t want to put a blanket ‘no’ on everything long-term.

As well, it is one of the most downloaded apps in the world as of October last year, with an estimated 104 million downloads, which means it is going to be pretty hard to avoid. Turns out after about five minutes of looking into Tik Tok, the answer for me was a firm ‘no’ whenever Joan asked for her own account.

I was pretty sure I was going to say no anyway, based on the fact that she is only eight. Despite being able to set various degrees of privacy on Tik Tok accounts, there are just so many problems with it for me. Firstly, I think it must seriously affect attention spans in developing brains.

I know there have been reports of people becoming addicted to watching the endless 15- second videos, and that obviously isn’t good. Also, the one day Joan did watch it for some time with a friend, she woke up that night with a nightmare and blamed Tik Tok herself.

Second, with millions of minors using the app, there are massive concerns about who is able to contact them directly, which is beyond frightening. Not to mention the fact you can’t control the language and content your kids might come into contact with. Plus on top of that is the same problem that, like other social media channels, anyone can comment on the videos you make, good or bad.

However, when I spoke about the app only a few weeks later with a colleague of mine, their opinion was that it is great for encouraging creativity and technical literacy in kids. Users can learn to shoot, edit, and upload their content and learn to add in music, animation, and special effects to their videos.

The colleague I was talking to about Tik Tok has children in their teens, which I think is very different to the under 12s and do take their points on board. But the same issue would remain that as an open site, if other users choose to post awful comments on a person’s content, they can’t be expected to be immune to that.

So as things stand, Joan won’t be getting a Tik Tok account, no matter how many times she asks. As time goes on and Joan gets older, we can revisit it. But honestly by then Tik Tok will likely have imploded and there will be another app taking over the world, that will test us as parents.