Lakeeta B., a mother of two kids living in Washington, D.C., said she began noticing a change in her outgoing daughter’s interests and demeanor when she was around 14 years old. Her daughter was a cheerleader, a gymnast and “a really, really good kid,” she told Atlanta Black Star.
But Lakeeta’s daughter soon became someone she didn’t recognize. “I didn’t know this kid. I was like, ‘who’s this kid?’ You know what I mean?” she said.
The concerned parent believes the popular social media app TikTok played a huge part in her daughter’s decline.
“As they get older, they kind of start settling into their own personalities and things of that nature,” Lakeeta said. Her daughter, who once aspired to be a fashion designer, began spending more time in her room scrolling on the app.
“I didn’t realize that it happened to be TikTok until I had a family member send me a post which [my daughter] had posted and it was very, very dark,” she said.
The post suggested her daughter was having suicidal thoughts, according to Lakeeta. The mother said her child also posted images of marijuana.
“Typically if you’re living in a house with someone and this is a child, you think that you’re as tuned in as you possibly can, but then you learn that the outside world has a bigger influence on children and more pressure that we care to admit,” she said.
How TikTok impacts children’s health
Kelvin Goode, the founder of consumer justice platform ClaimsHero, says what makes TikTok particularly harmful is the lack of control young people have over what appears on their feed.
“If you’re on Instagram, you’re usually seeing content from people that you actually follow,” Goode, whose platform is helping thousands of families take legal action against TikTok, told Atlanta Black Star.
“TikTok pumps content out to anyone,” he said, also noting that the app has design defects that internal documents have shown…
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