4 Negative Impacts of TikTok on Children

Who doesn't know the application that hits nowadays? Yaps, exactly! TikTok! The application, which was blocked by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in 2018, has finally been reopened and has actually been increasingly booming since the existence of Covid-19. TikTok itself is an application to make short videos that provide unique and dancing effects and a lot of songs in it that users can use easily with great results. 

Therefore, this application has its own appeal from all ages to express their hobbies and work through this application. But who would have thought that along with its development, the sophistication of this application not only had a positive impact such as sharpening children's creativity in making short videos, but this application also had a negative impact on its users, especially for children who were underage. 

At this time, we can see that there are still a lot of videos uploaded by teenagers or children that contain content that is unnatural and not according to their age. What are the dangers of the TikTok application? The following are the negative impacts of the TikTok application on children.

1. TikTok contains a lot of inappropriate content

If we see, there is indeed a lot of content on Tik Tok that is not suitable for children to watch.  There are lots of Tik Tok videos that contain harsh words, hate speech, and even obscene content. The existence of these inappropriate videos can be harmful to the mental development of children and make them imitate this unkind thing.

2. Make children addicted to playing TikTok

There are various kinds of videos on TikTok, this will attract the attention of the children so that they forget the time. Children will be addicted and will continue to open this application until they forget about the time and even forget to study, and become lazy. Even worse, the effect of this addiction is to make children introverted, rarely socialize because they are only focused on their gadgets.  In addition, this can also affect children's emotions so that they get emotional faster when we warn them or forbid them.

3.  Trigger excessive children's narcissism

As we know, in this TikTok application, people are competing to get a large number of likes and comments of praise from netizens to make them famous. This makes TikTok users willing to do anything for the sake of content so that they are viral and famous.  Not a few of these content creators from various ages from adults to children make content behaving strangely, dancing indecently, even taking dangerous actions.

4. Damaging children's morale and behavior

As explained in the previous point, because of the number of videos that were inappropriate and enlivened, this made more and more people to imitate them. For example, we can see when there is a video of a child swaying together showing off their bodies in school uniforms. This results in a loss of shame and morale in children.