Today, my friend Jill told me about how she couldn’t get off her phone and stayed up all night. The reason why, you ask? She was on TikTok.  

If you don’t know already, which you should, TikTok is a social media app that is available on all devices. How it operates is very simple. You just scroll through short videos, maybe leave a comment here and there, send a video to a friend, and repeat. At this point, almost everyone in 4th-8th grade in this school has Tiktok. It has even gotten to the point where some schools have exposing pages on TikTok!  

But back to Jill’s story. 

As Jill told me, she couldn’t get off of TikTok because each time she scrolled, the TikToks got more and more consuming. This is actually happening to a lot of people, not being able to get off of TikTok because it is so addicting. What I think about this situation (being a little addicted to TikTok myself), is that it’s not very healthy to be on TikTok all day, especially if you are in 6th grade or lower. The reason I think this is because when you’re on a device all day, it can affect not only your eyesight, but your attention span. 

Let me explain. If you haven’t noticed, a lot of TV shows are being discontinued and people are canceling their subscriptions to popular streaming sites like Netflix! This is most likely because, since some people are on TikTok 24/7, they can no longer watch long TV shows and movies. Sometimes, movies are shown on Tiktok in several short clips. People’s attention spans are getting shorter. 

My personal experience with TikTok isn’t really that confusing. I downloaded TikTok on my phone around the time covid started. It was very popular because we were all in quarantine and everyone was bored. As TikTok was in its primal stage, I used to watch a lot of TikTokers who are still well known today, like Charli D’Amelio, Khaby Lame, Roblox Storytime and other things that were popular at the time. I wasn’t as addicted to TikTok as many people are now.  

Even though TikTok has already done its damage on people, there is a solution to the attention span problem. TikTok has added a screen timer to make sure that their younger audiences won’t be on Tiktok for too long! But,it seems like since almost everyone is addicted to Tik Tok. Maybe we all need to go outside and just touch grass.