Many of these girls are shouting out "beans!" at unpredictable intervals. Psychiatrists worldwide-from the South Atlantic island of St Helena, to New Caledonia in the South Pacific, to almost anywhere on the planet where kids have access to the Internet-began reporting a surge of teenage girls self-diagnosing with Tourette syndrome.
Between spring 2020 and autumn 2021, that number skyrocketed to about 60. Doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital used to see one, maybe two teenagers a year presenting with new-onset Tourette syndrome. Increasingly, they are looking online for clues and for guidance. Young people are struggling to figure out who they are. But is it truly harmful to teens?Īdolescence can be confusing. " TikTok knew I was bisexual (or gay, or trans) before I did" is a common trope online. And the same is true of sexual variations. " TikTok can read my mind" is a common refrain among young people, as the app soon starts serving up videos that are precisely what the viewer was hoping to see: whether it’s a funny cat video, or a video of synchronized swimming, or one about applying glitter make-up, or a video of a pretty girl dancing in a way that appeals to a particular teen boy and wearing precisely the outfit that boy finds most arousing, doing exactly the moves that the boy finds most irresistible. Within hours, or even minutes, your videos become more specific, more customized to your interests. The algorithm then hones your preferences. It takes note of which videos you watch and-crucially- how much time you spend watching them, and which videos you watch more than once. TikTok then offers you some of the most popular videos that match your interests and starts monitoring what you do. When you join TikTok, you are asked some questions about your interests and what sort of things you’d like to see. Experts agree that the key to its success is its unique algorithm. Every day, more than one billion different videos are viewed on TikTok. But it is more than that.įor starters, TikTok is now the world’s most downloaded app and the world's #1 most visited website, ahead of Google (#2) and Facebook (#3). Or if you have used TikTok, you may think of it as an app for sharing videos of teens doing funny dances or cute pets doing tricks, which it is.
How much do you know about TikTok? Maybe you’ve heard of it but haven’t used it.
0 kommentar(er)
