I pretended to be a 14-year-old girl on TikTok — and what I saw was so upsetting
Minutes after logging on to social media as Tiffany Marks, a fictitious 14-year-old girl, I was flooded with videos promoting underage drinking and gun violence, along with tips from Andrew Tate, the notoriously misogynistic influencer being detained in Romania as part of a rape and sex trafficking operation.
But, even more upsetting were the posts from young women sharing the intimate details of their struggles with depression, anxiety, extreme loneliness and other mental health issues.
“I’m actually happy my friends don’t realize how much I’m struggling right now, but it hurts realizing none of them know me well enough to notice,” one teen lamented on TikTok.
Another revealed that she goes on an “emotional bender” when she feels like she’s not getting enough attention, causing her to behave erratically and engage in dangerous social media activities such as communicating with unsavory people. A third troubled soul said she “feels like death.”
A July 2021 report from Rush University Medical Center found that an overconsumption of mental health content on TikTok might be the cause of the recent “self-diagnose” trend — which has millions online branding themselves, and their posts, with popular hashtags like #Tourettes, #BDP (borderline personality disorder), #Bipolar and #DID (dissociative identity disorder) — sans confirmation from doctors.
I’d previously spent five days posing as a 14-year-old boy named Jayden on TikTok and YouTube and was shocked at the racist, violent and misogynistic content that I had been fed.
I decided to repeat my experience as a teen girl — creating social media profiles under a fake name to see what the algorithms sent my way — and found both stark similarities and differences. (I did not post content or directly interact with other users.)
As Tiffany, I was immediately plied with alcohol, something that didn’t happen to me as Jayden.
A clip of a 15-year-old blond bragging about downing shots of hard liquor with her mom’s blessing was one of the first snippets to hit Tiffany’s “For You Page” on TikTok.
Videos of intoxicated girls fighting in the street were followed by snaps of Gen Zers insisting that tequila is the “ultimate hot girl alcohol” because it makes you appear “skinnier.”
“How-to” posts about making the perfect black out rage gallon or “borg” — a 128-ounce cocktail comprised of water, vodka, a caffeinated flavor enhancer and powdered electrolytes — fast became staples on my timeline. Binge-drinking the TikTok-famous concoction, which has amassed over 83.2 million views on the platform, sent dozens of college kids at the University of Massachusetts to the hospital just this past Saturday.
More alarming, however, was the avalanche of videos promoting guns, as well as the offensive musings of 36-year-old Tate. He was banned from TikTok and YouTube and other platforms in 2022, but clips featuring him still dominate social media.
A clip of a man firing off bullets from a P80 handgun was the first item to surface in my “YouTube Shorts” section. Then came a post showing a man holding a gun to the back of someone’s head with the caption reading “How to end up in heaven.” A post mocking an 18-year-old woman who survived getting shot nine times with an AK-47 and an AR-15 was also sent my way, followed by a video titled “5 cheap handguns that don’t jam.”
A November 2022 study by Morning Consult found that 84% of young women in the US are active YouTube users and 75% have TikTok accounts.
Other stats are more disturbing.
According to CDC stats released last month, most teen girls (57%) felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, which is double the rate for teen boys (29%). Nearly one in three teen girls seriously considered attempting suicide.
The inner workings of the algorithms the social media platforms use are shrouded in mystery, but what seems without question is the negative effect they’re having on young women.
