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I looked up Benadryl to see if the IV shortage had ended yet, and an FDA article from 2020 caught my eye about teens dying from doing the Benadryl TikTok Challenge.
…everything I learn about TikTok is against my will, and it’s always for something absolutely god-awful.
Yeah okay but teens were dying from Tide pods without the help of TikTok. Going back generations kids will find a way to do stupid stuff and risk their life. Yeah the internet is making it worse. But TikTok is not the sole contributor to deadly challenges and stupid ideas.
The annoying thing about the tide pod challenge was that it started out as a joke on a satire site, caught media attention, and then kids started actually doing it in wider numbers because of the media attention.
Sure, there were some kids before that who were putting them in their mouths, mostly young kids because that’s what kids do. But having witnessed the tide pod craze firsthand, I can’t help but feel it might not have been as big a deal without major news hubs picking it up.
With TikTok, it feels like there’s some dangerous new thing every other week, and that’s because of how TikTok itself is consumed.
It’s a content-farming machine constantly churning out ideas with close to zero regulation and zero space for you to sit down and question it. Unless, of course, you’re disabled, fat, queer, or trying to talk about important issues. Then your ass can get restricted quite easily.
A lot of teens today have grown up with a highly regulated internet where content is heavily monitored. They’re used to thinking of certain things as “safe” because why would people say unsafe stuff online? If it reaches the algorithm front page, it must be fine. Right?
(Side note: I’ve also witnessed this level of unthinking trust with my elderly parents and many people in their generation, so I do not think it’s a young person’s problem. It’s a lack of internet safety awareness that has been destroyed by the widespread sanitization and capitalization of the Internet.)
Except TikTok isn’t like that, and that’s a problem. It enjoys making money too much, as do the creators who, after a certain threshold, get paid for creating such heinous content.
So yeah kids have always done ridiculous shit, but the alacrity at which TikTok facilitates in churning out new things at breakneck speed with little room to process it doesn’t help.
Speaking of unthinking trust, it is worth remembering that it is very important to question any story or post you hear that stupid, dangerous trends originate on TikTok, because that is a very purposeful and documented misinformation campaign created by Facebook. Do you remember that devious licks campaign where it was a TikTok trend to vandalize school property? Well, it was fake. It was a trend that got started on Facebook and then some people on TikTok did it and Facebook paid some people a lot of money to publicize this “dangerous TikTok trend.”  it’s always important when you’re online to ask who benefits from this story being publicized and to wonder if there are ulterior motives. Media literacy is important.

… for fuck’s sake. It’s like a never-ending inception of fuckery.
Nothing is real. Jesus Christ.
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Phenomena (1985)
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i use humor to cover up the fact that i want to jump off a bridge
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