Pushing against the panic: Considering the positives of TikTok and children

Abstract

This short commentary is intended to be provocative, as we argue the importance of considering ‘other’ aspects of children's everyday experiences of TikTok. We argue the need to be cautious about how the risks of TikTok, and digital platforms at large, for children are often amplified at the expense of erasing public awareness about the joy, connection, and creativity that many children and young people also experience on these emerging platforms. Through this work, we call for a shift in perspective in our research community: a shift that moves away from the assumptions (re)produced by policymakers and media, towards an approach grounded in children's everyday experiences so as to consider the implications of TikTok for children in a positive and generative manner.

Introduction

Nothing embodies the sentiment behind the satirical plea of ‘won’t somebody please think of the children’—a classic line from The Simpsons (1996/2018)—more than the phrase ‘TikTok and children’. Launched in 2016 by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, today TikTok and its mainland Chinese counterpart Douyin are two of the world's most popular short-video platforms among young people. ¹

During the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok was instrumental in nurturing creativity and maintaining connections while communities and families were separated (McLean et al., 2023). Over this same period, however, TikTok has continued to face public, political, and media scrutiny for a range of issues of varying degrees, including quite prominently, its perceived inherently harmful influence on children's lives and wellbeing.

The dominant perception that ‘TikTok is bad for children’ is clearly demonstrated through the US congressional committee hearing titled: TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023). On 23 March 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Chew appeared before US congress at what a Representative at hearing described as ‘the most bipartisan committee in Congress’ (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023, 02:03:40). The hearing, which lasted over five hours, saw Chew asked repeatedly about the ‘inherent risks’ TikTok poses to children's wellbeing. For example, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers (Republican–Washington) set the tone of the hearing with her opening remarks as the Chair, claiming:

TikTok also targets our children. The ‘For You’ algorithm is a tool for TikTok to own [children's] attention and prey on their innocence. Within minutes of creating an account, [TikTok's] algorithm can promote suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders to children. It encourages challenges for them to put their lives in danger (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023: 00:10:13).

The sentiment that TikTok is maliciously harmful to children was repeated throughout the hearing by other committee members. For instance, Rep. Kathy Castor (Democrat–Florida), accused that ‘TikTok could be designed to minimise the harm to kids, but a decision was made to aggressively addict kids in the name of profits’ (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023: 01:30:00). Similarly, Rep. John Sarbanes (Democrat-Maryland) argued that

it's not a fair fight, is it? The algorithms are on one side of the screen and the human brain is on the other…drowning in these algorithms in many instances at an age where [a child's] brain's not even fully developed yet;… further accusing that ‘those addictive impulses are being sort of perfected by the technology (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023: 01:38:58).

Comparably, Rep. Earl ‘Buddy’ Carter (Republican–Georgia) asserted that:

research has shown that TikTok is the most addictive platform out there and the reason for that, as we’ve been told, is because it has the most advanced algorithm. And the Chinese Communist Party knows this. I don’t speak for everyone, but there are those on this committee, including myself, who believe that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in psychological warfare through TikTok to deliberately influence US children (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023: 02:04:09).

Of course, this sentiment expressed by Rep. Carter is xenophobic and stems from a long-standing socio-political context, fraught with US-based diplomatic concerns about TikTok being foreign-owned. For example, at the time of writing this commentary, the US Congress was progressing legislation to force the sale of TikTok from ByteDance (Peller et al., 2024). What we want to recognise with this example then, is how US policymakers appear to be leveraging fears about children's wellbeing on TikTok, and entangling them with broader geopolitical struggles, for purposes less benevolent than championing the best interests of children.

Ending his question time, Rep. Carter pointed to a sign behind his head which had the phrase ‘Deadly TikTok Challenges’ covered in ‘police caution tape’, and asked Chew: ‘We’re talking about children dying. Do you know how many children have died because of [TikTok challenges]? Do you have any idea? Can you tell me?’ (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023: 02:08:37). Chew responded repeatedly: ‘Congressman again, the majority of people who use our platform use it for positive experiences…the majority of people who get on our platform have a good experience’ (House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2023: 02:08:50).

Protecting children online and keeping them safe from harm is a very real issue that requires serious attention and efforts by governments, industry, researchers, and individuals. But this US hearing is an acute example of hyperbolic political rhetoric about the ‘risks’ of TikTok, which contributes to public (mis)understandings of the platform and obscures the more benign, enjoyable, and generative realities that many young people on TikTok experience, such as connecting with family and friends and playing with media making (e.g., Sarwatay et al., 2022; Zhao and Abidin, 2023). These widespread sentiments of TikTok represent a ‘media effects’ perspective which assumes causal relationships between the platform and children's development and wellbeing (Bryant and Finklea, 2022). However, given how new the platform is, the contexts, content, and quality of TikTok use remain under-researched. The operationalisation of the phrases such as ‘research has shown’ and ‘research suggests’ by committee members throughout the hearing—who also failed to contextualise the scope and generalisability of the research in question—demonstrates the potential influence our findings as a research community has on media and decision-maker narratives about TikTok and children. While the underlying concern of wanting children to have safe experiences online is important and we emphatically encourage the continuation of critical research to support these outcomes, we also want to highlight that this research can sometimes paint only one side of the picture regarding children's digital experiences.

Of course, TikTok is far from the only social media platform to conjure concerns about children's wellbeing and safety online. In 2021, BuzzFeed News reported on a leaked internal memo from Meta (then Facebook) that the tech company was intending to build ‘an Instagram for kids under the age of 13’ (Mac and Silverman, 2021). News of Instagram's interest in building a ‘child-friendly version,’ swiftly galvanised parents and policymakers to vehemently oppose the development of any such service and spurred more broadly, public debate about the impacts of social media on children such as on their mental health and self-esteem (Kelly, 2021). But fears about the impact of new media on children is far from novel, as scholarship on ‘moral panics’ and youth culture has shown for decades (Marwick, 2008; Springhall, 1998), this pattern of adults dwelling on concerns without considering the positives experiences that children and youth encounter through an ever-evolving digital media landscape.

This short commentary is intended to be provocative, as we argue the importance of considering ‘other’ aspects of children's everyday experiences of TikTok. We argue the need to be cautious about how the risks of TikTok, and digital platforms at large, for children are often amplified at the expense of erasing public awareness about the joy, connection, and creativity that many children and young people also experience on these emerging platforms. Through this work, we call for a shift in perspective in our research community: a shift that moves away from the assumptions (re)produced by policymakers and media, towards an approach grounded in children's everyday experiences so as to consider the implications of TikTok for children in a positive and generative manner.

Findings of two research projects

As a vantage point to critique the deficit approach, we present the findings of two research projects where the problematic connotations associated with TikTok are balanced with ‘silver linings’ which point to the positive and generative aspects of TikTok use among children and families. The first project involves researching Chinese parents’ perceptions and family experiences of Douyin, the Chinese domestic version of TikTok (Kaye et al., 2022). The second project is Playful by Design by the Digital Futures Commission (Livingstone and Pothong, 2021). We have chosen to highlight these examples because the research, both in terms of design and findings, challenges the deficit-based, harm-oriented approach that often fuels public debate and policy-makers decisions—as described above. Our hope in pointing to these examples is to inspire the TikTok research community to consider how our research can contribute to productive discussions and actions that support children's playful, creative, safe, diverse and ethical experiences of the platform.

The first research project that we would like to discuss here is an international comparative study exploring family media practices in seven countries. The study aims to understand parental views and family experiences of screen media and how parental mediation of children's media practices changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, an international team of researchers interviewed parents and caregivers to grasp how and why these changes happened both in relation to the pandemic conditions and beyond. One particular national context under investigation was China. Led by one of the authors of this article, the China study found that short video platforms like Douyin became both a problematic and enabling site in children's and families’ daily lives during pandemic restrictions of lockdowns, school closures, and prolonged social distancing. Because of these restrictive measures, most of the children's daily routines were moved online. In addition, children suddenly had an excessive amount of ‘free time’ which used to be occupied by activities outside of the home. During the pandemic, however, digital and screen media became an undesirable yet useful tool to fill in the temporal gaps. This was especially important for working parents who had to juggle between multiple work and caring tasks.

Overall, the Chinese parents expressed a high level of concern and anxiety over their children's increased ‘screen time’ during the pandemic, including the use of short video platforms like TikTok. However, this does not obscure the fact that parents inadvertently observed the ‘good’ things that these platforms offer to their children, because of the substantial amount of time they spent with their children due to pandemic restrictions. Qinfang, a Chinese mother of two children, shared how she and her eight-year-old daughter learned about handicrafts on Kuaishou, a Chinese short video platform similar to TikTok, during pandemic lockdowns. This helped the family to entertain together because ‘it's not possible for the children to just study at home all the time [during lockdowns].’ Jiang, a father of an 11-year-old girl, recollected how he tried to maximise the benefits of his daughter's use of Douyin and minimise the risks. He admitted the potential of Douyin content to be ‘educational’ and ‘helpful with lowering her stress and anxiety levels with academic performance’. That said, he managed the risks by manually selecting content from particular Douyin accounts for his daughter to watch, based on her preferences. In this way, Jiang hoped to help his daughter avoid all the problematic content on Douyin, such as the overtly emotionally-negative videos or soft pornography. For another example: while Ye, mother of an 11-year-old girl, described her feelings about her daughter's media experiences as ‘contradictory’, she still emphasised the ‘positive’ aspects of Douyin. She mentioned how she came across Douyin content with ‘positive energy’, meaning videos which are inspirational and motivational for young people, and shared them with her daughter. Ye saw educational benefits of content like this and was fine with her daughter watching it under her supervision.

A key finding prominent across the seven countries in this project was parents’ changing perceptions of the meanings and implications of digital and screen media for their children, including TikTok/Douyin. Parents were able to make more nuanced distinctions regarding the purposes and content of children's use of digital media because of what they had actually seen during the pandemic. This indicates the discrepancy between TikTok (or digital media in general) as imagined by adults and as experienced by children. The widespread narratives of harm and risk associated with TikTok for children are largely produced through the lens of the adults, which have significantly downplayed children's generative experiences of the platform.

The second research we want to point to is the work of Livingstone and Pothong (2021) on Playful by Design from the 5Rights Foundation’s Digital Futures Commission. The Digital Futures Commission by the 5Rights Foundation is a non-profit charitable organisation in the UK that is dedicated to placing children's best interests at the heart of designing digital products, services, and content. The group has produced several reports and recommendations based on their extensive research with children, families, and stakeholders, including their Child Rights by Design (Digital Futures Commission, 2023), which is based on General comment No. 25 (2021) on children's rights in relation to the digital environment (OHCCR, 2022). Note, General comment No. 25 is a document that translates the Articles covered in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) into the digital context. General Comment No. 25 recognises that while ‘the digital environment was not originally designed for children…it plays a significant role in children's lives’ (OHCHR, 2021: para. 12), and thus, underscores the importance of consulting children and giving their views pertaining to issues that matter to them, due consideration (OHCHR, 2021: para. 1). Playful by Design is both a report and toolkit (5Rights, 2023) that offers evidence-based recommendations to product designers and technology innovators to improve children's digital experiences, based on consultations with children.

In 2021, alongside running consultations with 126 children aged 3 to 18, the researchers of Playful by Design surveyed over 1000 children aged 6 to 17 in the UK, seeking to understand how children judge particular apps, including TikTok, for their qualities of ‘free play.’ The concept of ‘free play’ refers to child-led, imaginative, voluntary, open-ended, stimulating, emotionally resonant, social, and diverse play that involves risk taking but is safe, provides a sense of achievement, and is immersive (Colvert, 2021; Livingstone and Pothong, 2021). Play is important towards children's development, self-directed learning, and is an effective means of teaching and guidance; play is also therapeutic and contributes to and is an enactment of children's wellbeing, and ultimately, is a child's right (Cowan, 2020). This research, thus, sought to better understand how children experience free play on various popular apps, including TikTok, in the hopes of improving children's opportunities to experience free play by overcoming inhibiting factors in product design.

In respect to TikTok, the Playful by Design research offers a productive means to highlight the everyday benefits and challenges children experience on the platform. For example, the research found, based on 1033 children aged 6 to 17, that 48% of children agreed ‘a lot’ with the statement that: ‘I had a great time’ on TikTok (Livingstone and Pothong, 2021: 29). However, 43% of the same sample of children also reported experiencing something upsetting on the platform (Livingstone and Pothong, 2021: 30). This finding underscores the reality that children, like adults, can have multiple perspectives and experiences of a platform. This finding also begins to point to the complexity in striking the right balance in mitigating children's exposure to unpleasant and harmful encounters when children also have many positive experiences online. For example, the research also found, based on surveys with 210 children aged 6 to 17, that children portrayed their play on TikTok as ‘mainly social (90% agree), diverse (88%) and emotionally resonant (78%)’ but that TikTok also offered rather ‘limiting voluntary (28%) and intrinsically motivated (42%) play experience’ (Livingstone and Pothong, 2021: 53). The authors of the research highlight that overall: ‘Our survey results show that children see TikTok's features as being “good for people their age”, intergenerational, offering creative tools, and easy for new users to join’ (Livingstone and Pothong, 2021: 53). And through consultations with the children that, ‘they valued TikTok's creative tools, personalisation and contact control features that afforded them diverse playful experiences and social interactions with people of different ages’ (Livingstone and Pothong, 2021: 54). These findings illustrate that children do experience free play on TikTok and while barriers to a ‘purely positive’ experience of the platform exist, children enjoy TikTok. Juxtaposing the findings of Playful by Design to the hyperbolic rhetoric by decision-makers in the US hearing described above, illustrates an enormous gap between children's likely experiences of TikTok and adults’ imaginaries about their experiences. And we, as a research community, play a vital role in bridging that gap.

Reimagining the narrative about ‘TikTok and children’

So, what could a research agenda that amplifies the ‘good’, ‘prosocial’ or ‘positive’ aspects of children's and young people's TikTok use achieve? How could it reframe and balance public perceptions and debates of children's digital media experiences to inform family practices, tech policy, and government regulation in more nuanced ways that are grounded in the everyday realities of user experiences? In the rest of this article, we propose three research principles underlying this agenda. Collectively, they enable researchers in the field to approach TikTok and children in a balanced manner and advance public perceptions of the platform beyond moral panic. We propose reimagining the deficit-based, harm-oriented approach to understanding children's experiences of short video platforms, towards a research agenda that remains critical but focused on amplifying the positive experiences that children and young people have on TikTok. We use the term ‘reimagine’ purposely here as re-imagining requires us to first have an awareness of our ‘situated imagination’—our foundational knowledge and assumptions about how different socio-cultural things are connected in the world (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis, 2002). Reimaging then requires us to reconsider alternative pathways to build knowledge upon. It requires a degree of reflexivity about our situated knowledge from which we extrapolate our research problem.

Drawing on the two research projects discussed above, we propose three principles to guide the reimagining of research on TikTok and children. This includes: 1) critical reflections of ‘hot topics’ in the media about TikTok and children; 2) championing diversity as the research subject, for example, diversity of families, ages, and experiences on TikTok; and 3) privileging children's agency, voices, and perspectives within research.

Principle one: Critical reflections of ‘hot topics’ in the media about TikTok and children

We call for more critical investigation of where the public emotions and perceptions about TikTok come from, particularly around ‘hot topics’. We conceptualise ‘hot topics’ as those matters of concern (Latour, 2004)—such as wellbeing and mental health, TikTok challenges, and screen time, to name a few—which mobilise adult's imaginaries and fears about children's participation online. It is important to view the widespread ‘problems’ associated with TikTok as socio-culturally located and constructed. Therefore, it is important to employ a constructivist approach in unpacking the actors who produce the dominant narratives and discourses around TikTok and children.

Some research questions that can guide our thinking around this principle include:

How is the ‘hype’ of TikTok socially constructed?

How are children portrayed in public discourses about TikTok?

Who are the main actors producing dominant discourses about TikTok, and what are the factors that lead the actors to particular sets of discourses?

How do children and families perceive and negotiate these discourses in everyday life?

Principle two: Championing diversity as the research subject

We emphasise the importance of considering difference and diversity when understanding TikTok and children. This means careful and critical response towards normative claims about TikTok regarding what should or should not be done with the platform. Children's experiences of TikTok are underpinned by a range of contexts and conditions, which can be easily obscured in research that aims to produce ‘generalisable’ findings.

To help enact this principle, we offer the following research questions:

How is TikTok experienced differently in different national, cultural, and temporal contexts?

How are ‘risks’ and ‘harm’ understood by families from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds?

On whose experiences and narratives was existing ‘evidence’ about the implications of TikTok for children based?

Principle three: Privileging children's agency, voices, and perspectives within research

Lastly, we acknowledge the importance of considering and prioritising children's own voices and perspectives in research about TikTok and children. In this, we echo recent calls to critique the prevalent adultism in contemporary scholarship (Wall, 2022). This involves both methodological and ethical considerations to value how children understand their experiences themselves.

We suggest considering the below research questions to support children's agency:

How do children understand the affordances of TikTok?

How and for what purposes do children use the platform in daily life?

How do children negotiate the different mediators (e.g., parents, teachers, platform, government) in using TikTok?

How do children see and cope with the problems associated with the platform?

Of course, while TikTok is not designed to be accessed by children under 13, we know anecdotally—as well as through research such as the two examples above—that children access content and experiences of the platform through their parents, siblings, or across other digital platforms. This means that while researching under 13s’ experiences of TikTok comes with logistical challenges in the research context (e.g., with university ethics clearance), we strongly encourage the research community to pursue this line of study. Specifically, we encourage research that investigates under 13s’ everyday experiences with emerging platforms like TikTok, which contribute to nuanced and balanced descriptions of children's engagement online.

Better digital experiences for children, especially those under 13, are possible (Dezuanni et al., 2023). Researchers at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child have released their Manifesto for a better Children's Internet which offers 17 actional principles that help create better online experiences for children. This critical and aspirational document calls for a society-wide response, and acknowledgement of responsibility, to ensure children have better internet experiences. Specifically, the document calls on government, industry, media, and educational stakeholders, as well as families, to strive towards this goal; and as a research community, we play a vital part in materialising this goal by offering evidence-based descriptions and recommendations. Moving away from knee-jerk reactions when it comes to media and decision-maker narratives about TikTok and children requires us, as researchers, to (re)consider and be reflexive about our own assumptions and imaginaries when designing and conducting research on the subject. As such, we invite the research community to create an agenda that reimagines what ‘TikTok and children’ means in respect to better digital experiences.

The purpose of this article is not to deny any actual risks associated with children's everyday use of TikTok, but to advocate for careful and critical reflections on the political and popular discourses of these risks. The selling of TikTok to a non-Chinese company, for example, is perhaps necessary in the context of today's geopolitical tension between China and the United States, but it cannot be the best way to protect (American) children's rights and safety in an era of digital platforms. The discursively constructed ‘problems’ of TikTok for children can only further responsibilise parents to keep their children away from the platform, exacerbating parental anxiety and guilt when they could not afford to do this. We want to promote a balanced perspective of understanding of and research into the platform, and direct people's attention to the positive and generative aspects of TikTok use for children. The three principles proposed in this article allow us to avoid convenient generalisations of research findings that may have misrepresented families from diverse backgrounds and children's own voices. We believe only by deconstructing the moral panics around children and TikTok, and children's online experiences at large, can we properly allocate resources to address the actual risks in real life.