Those challenges actually affected me at work. I'm a highschool custodian. These kids vandalized restrooms, and locker rooms constantly. It made my life an actual living hell. The amounts of actual feces on the floor was insane. The urine everywhere was beyond gross. The smashing of mirrors and hand soap dispensers kept me crazy busy. I hate TikTok with a passion due to those supposed "challenges".

somewhere there’s trees that are tirelessly producing oxygen for these tiktokers and I think they owe them an apology

As I teacher, I can say that trusting parents to do the right thing is a goddamn game of chance. I teach in a community mostly populated by people living below the poverty line and holy shit. I sometimes wish that people are required to get certification before being allowed to have kids. I have to look at these broken children almost everyday and I can't do squat. Some don't even know that they're on their way to destruction since their parents don't care and their friends are doing the same thing. Anybody can be a mother/father. Not everybody can be a parent.

For those wondering - Asmon questioned TikTok being uniquely damaging to the human mind compared to other hobbies - that is not an open question. There are a ton of studies on television consumption and video game consumption etc. Television is pretty bad for the most part (most passive activities are), but you don't see the same kind of attention disorders develope with that that you do with short form stuff like TikTok. Video Games can actually have the complete opposite effect, so much so that there are actually video games that have obtained medical certification for TREATING attention disorders. The effects of course vary by game, but Strategy and Puzzle games tend to not just be safe to consume but actually bolster mental health and prevent cognitive decline.

The thing I find the most interesting is comparing the Chinese version of Tiktok with the Western version. The Chinese Tiktok is heavily moderated, and the majority of videos are about improving yourself, doing cool things, cute animals and generally happy things. The western version is pure negativity, dangerous trends, mental illness, politics and degeneracy. Go look for yourself and compare the two.

I think Asmon is deeply underestimating the power of TikTok algorithm, challenges before social media didn't have much reach, it was almost an innocent thing between friends, but now social media amplifies greatly even the most innocent stuff and the algorithm pushes things so it becomes this behemoth of a trend that may be really harmful to lots of people both physically and mentally

I agree that kids have always done dumb crap, but social media has certainly expanded the reach. What I think is really missing is that when I was growing up and anyone did something stupid your parents were informed and they sat you down to explain why you shouldn't have done that thing. Parents aren't really doing that anymore and don't take the time to monitor their kids online life.

as a teenager around this age i can confidently say that they know what they are doing and they are all, evil society is doomed when my generation starts running things

I do love when any criticism to TikTok is immediately "invalidated" by saying that "You only hate it bc it's Chinese"

"Where are the parents?" Unfortunately, sometimes it's the parents that are putting their children in these situations to profit off of them. Some people are truly demons, no heart.

Just for anyone who doesn't know, the legal age in Europe for online adult content is 18. 16 is the legal age to engage in physical sexual acts but you can't do adult online content unless you are 18 so Asmond has a point. The fact TikTok sets the age to 16 is completely fucked in itself.

"I remember vine challenges" Sure thats all fine, we all agree that humanity never changes in essence. But the difference between Vine challenges and TikTok challenges is the size of the participating audience. Tiktok is huge, vine was not

Gotta disagree with u asmongold.. I think people might have been dumb before individually, but social media made it worse by bringing the dumb together and influencing the not dumb to be dumb. Tik tok is worse because its an immediate gratification and information being absorb, reaching even more people than in any social media apart from KZfaq. Because tiktok is instant in gratification, everyone wants to outdo each other, and u see even more dangerous trends and deamining self worth than in the past.

I got off of TikTok during a vacation, and when I came back, I kept it going. Been almost 6 months now and I saw my mental health improve a ton. Death scrolling is real

Another thing to consider with all of this: the demographic for these apps has shifted to a younger audience since the days of Vine. Yes, there was stupid stuff on Vine [challenges, etc.], but you cannot tell me there were anywhere near as many elementary/middle school-aged kids with smart phones back then as there are today. The influence over young people a “stupid challenge” or stupid person can have is so much higher today.

My wife is a speech therapist and works with kids in the public school system… can confirm the information shared about how the response to COVID-19 stunted some kids’ language AND conflict management skills. It’s hurt a lot of kids and, unfortunately, we may not know how much damage was done until said kids reach the workforce.

22 yr sister of a 11 yrs girl here. I heavily monitor what my sister does with her devices and this video is an incredible example as to why. As a young girl who grew up with internet myself, I have done a lot of really regretful and questionable things that I wish I haven't. I can't stress enough how important it is for parents to start paying more attention to their kid's activity on the internet. I am, however, against completely controlling the kid, taking their privacy away or not giving any access to the internet, since this will only worsen the situation. I believe just having simple parent controls that would not let the kid interact with strangers in games, or filter what apps and content the kid can access is enough. Man tiktok is sure sickening.

I turned 18 in February, and I've pretty much given up on all the bullshit that has happened because of TikTok. I'll try to ignore it, yet I still see my 17/18 year old classmates scrolling through it nonstop during class. It's horrible and I'm glad I never touched it back when I was 14 years old.

Ive said it a million times and I'll say it a million more: children do not belong online and parents need yo stop buying their kids iphones and then leaving them alone so they dont have to actually parent. If you cant monitor your damn kids, you shouldnt be a parent. Point blank period.

TikTok should be banned. This is not complicated.

Social media is so dumb.

He keeps comparing tik tok to other stuff that was also bad like that somehow makes it... not bad? Tik Tok's reach is far bigger he keeps missing that fundamental point. Yea kids are stupid but that stupidity can be dangerous too when it's at scale.

Tik tok is pure evil. That algorithm is super good at pinpointing what will waste the most of your time. I had to delete it after like a month.

I've said it before and i'll say it again: delete all social media from the internet, starting with tiktok. It does far more harm than good. The fact that this is such a problem is insane to me.

I work in child protection and online grooming is a live and very challenging issue. I’ve delivered training to parents and social workers who don’t understand how to use net nannies let alone understand complex algorithms or the subtleties of grooming processes. While grooming and exploitation are not new, the self-reinforcing AI assisted access and opportunity is. It feels like a losing battle but it helps when people like yourselves take a stand and shine a light on the problem. Thank you!

Asmongold underplaying how damaging social media in general can be.

One of the most disturbing challenges I remember is that one where ppl randomly ran up and slapped strangers as hard as they could and killed some people and bum fights were huge when I was younger

"Where's Chris Hansen?" *They canceled him*

I always respect the fact that no matter the discussion, Asmonn always contributes by actually giving his opinions and puts genuine thought into his response

People act like only boomers hate tiktok but I'm a teen and hate it with a passion.

I do think there is a _snowball effect_ from social media. Back in the day, yes _weird_ stuff did happen, but it wasn't as exposed - and - now that it is, can influence other people, on a larger scale.

When i Was 16 my mom wouldn’t get internet for the house because she “didn’t believe in it”. As a 16 year old i had to call the cable company to set our home up and i was responsible for the bill. 15 years later we have kids selling feet pics on tiktok

I work in cybersecurity so I can't have tiktok on any of my devices due to the spyware that is attached to the app. After watching this I think I'm cool with not being able to have tiktok. This shit is nuts.

I'm glad I didn't succumb to peer pressure back when TikTok was first getting around. It's scary thinking about how crappy my mental health could've been if I had chased what was popular at the time

Get mad at the parents of those girls before you get mad at the girls.

Yet some Massive KZfaqrs still defend TikToks existence

My main issue is that this isn't tiktok being in over their head, it's clearly them allowing this to happen when they have the means to stop it. I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of those issues don't exist on the Chinese version of the app

Another issue with the kids and young teens in general is the parents just not caring what their kid access online. Stop giving children wholesale internet access, limit it in the first place and monitor the sites that they do use.

The 22 minute mark is where I started feeling ill.

His channel is just named 'Upper Echelon' since he went on to cover more than just gaming topics.

I'm so happy some people isolate themselves from this crap and focus on WOW and stuff to stay normal.

The whole point is that TikTok is super addictive full of short memory span clips that keep you scrolling, wasting valuable time and doing nothing with your life. The entire social media era is a poison that needs to be cleansed or the Western society is going off a cliff.

This is why Parents matter. Hey parent, have a spine and say 'no'.

13:40 about speech therapy, I'm a stutter myself and when we hit year into pandemic lockdowns in 2021, my stuttering was starting to come back after years of it having a minimal impact. If it impacts me as an adult with this condition, I can't even imagine how it is for kids with a stuttering condition as well.

The one dumb challenge I remember was the Skullcrusher Challenge, which was 2 people, one on each side of another person, basically dunking that person's head into the ground, for no fucking reason

Back in my day we just played outside with sticks and rocks and took candy from strangers, the hell happened to society?

its not any media, its the society that formed the people who use them.

Imagine if there was an age restrictions before you could use social media... then these kids can learn how not to be inappropriate on the internet.

"tik-tok behaviour". This need to be a new term of diagnostic

Tiktok challenges can sometimes be dangerous. In the last few months in the UK we have seen 2 children who died doing a suffocate yourself challenge because they were told it was harmless fun by adults on Tiktok.

I'm a heavy tiktok user and I've never seen any of these dumb challenges personally, so it has some containment to where you only see it if you seek it out. But I also remember a time when news stations have falsely reported on "harmful tiktok challenges" to scare up sentiment

"Where are the parents?" Isn't that the million dollar question.

im glad i was a kid in the era where you would be lucky to have your parents buy you a nokia 3310 by the time you were 14-16 years old and you spent your childhood out playing in the forest

This title is so true and the sad reality of our society today

People being dumb in the past doesn’t somehow absolve current harmful behavior.

Thank you! People keep saying kids are getting dumber, but we were pretty dumb. It just wasn't documented.

So glad I isolate myself from society and just play wow

Tiktok is a psychological weapon

The only lives I get are people that build card towers with an emo filter on, bagging people to "not" send gifts. I'm not so mad about it anymore...

I'm a guy and when I was 15 I got people to donate money for the minecraft server I was running. My dad was worried about it even when my name, face, etc. had nothing to do with any of the money coming in. He's like 70 now as well and even he could understand that some things are often just too good to be true, or at least too good to not think carefully about.

I facepalmed and rolled my eyes soo many damn times watching this. I guess I had a shitty childhood not egging a person's house or burning down my garage in some "seeifitburns" challenge.

What did you expect of an app that doesn't do anything about pedophilia?

I think the real problem was the friends we made along the way.

Multi generational homes. Mom and dad cant do it alone, so grandma and grandpa help. Alternatively, mom and dad have more kids, so they can police each other.

I think Asmon is missing out on one big key factor when it comes to the argument of "disrespect" at the start of the video when he compares it to kids in highschool. Kids in highschool did it to be edgy and "cool". Kids on Social Media and vice versa Tiktok dont do it to be edgy and "cool". They do it because it gets attention. They dont care about wether or not it makes people angry, they just want people to see what they are doing because they are attention starved in this day and age.

My two cents: there will always be *something* that is fucked up and a dangerous influence for kids. I think a good solution would be to help teach critical thinking skills and educate over the many negative elements of the internet. Using the Internet comes with responsibility and it needs to be presented that way to the younger generation. You can use it as a tool for all sorts of things, but be prepared to pay the price if you don’t use it wisely.

The mindset of “kids being kids” is too similar to not making them understand things have consequences. Most kids getting away with it is because their parents don’t do much and the school can’t do much. There’s of course the idea of not holding kids up to the same standards as an adult but society has also let them get away with far more. You even see people making excuses for them raping someone or killing someone. I can empathize that their lives went that way while throwing consequences at them. Parents not believing their kids are being harmed or DOING harm is absurd. They don’t even check on them. I wasn’t allowed to close or lock my door nor was my sister WHY do these kids have complete isolation for hours?!

TikTok literally melts braincells it's insane.

thank you for the content. Ive been working nights and have shitty internet at work so Ive been downloading anything I can to help get me through my work week, keep up the posting, much love to you and your team

Tiktok is banned in India...❤️🇮🇳

I disagree 4chan was way more niche. Nowadays basically every kid has a phone and is trying to be an influencer so they do dumb things to get famous.

Yes its on the internet , yes every other platform faces/facing this problem , but tiktok by design amplifies it and makes it worse. Every other platform even if its heavily algorithm dominated you have manual control in some ways , on tiktok the algorithm feeds you everything , and since it is short form it appeals more to emotions/instincts than anything else , and it is by design .

11:30 I'd say Video Games can dramatically increase attention span, especially with in-depth story driven RPGs or professional competitive. You have to focus pretty much constantly in those genres otherwise you can miss story or die in competitive. I'd also say that whilst all social media has downsides, TikTok is especially detrimental to attention span due to its short form content that is endlessly swiped away.

This also goes back to how low salaries have become. Parents forced to work 2 or 3 jobs with low salaries simply don't have the time and energy to keep their kids in check and earn enough to survive.

bruh the Internet was supposed to be a gift (and a small portion of it still is, like being able to Google any fact you need to check and read the Wikipedia page on that is awesome, but that's about it) but turned out to be a curse in so many ways...

i agree with everything but i cant believe that you completely dont consider the fact that a whole generation is addicted to tiktok and getting braindamaged by it. This toxic problem is so huge and tiktok should be banned for the mental health of everyone. Maybe you dont get addicted but almost everyone else and especially the young people.

Out of morbid curiosity, I'd like to see some real numbers on just how bad this is. I'd like to see a group tasked with investigating this covertly and cover something like X cases per 1000 users. I'd like to see if they can actually find out these girls actual ages vs what's being claimed on the platform and I'd like to hear just how it is that the parents aren't apparently there.

1:05 I honestly feel like gen z could legitimately be the first generation where the holocaust is so far away that they're as detached from it as any other horrific thing in a history book

Love the tongue in cheek comment against Tater Tots. Dude poisons young men to think abusing animals is totally fine like some sort of cult leader

My faith in humanity continues to dwindle...

TikTok is the cancer of the internet, TikTok easy brought down the worlds IQ with several points.

The problem with TikTok is that its popular to young people. Young people are really easy to influence by popularity. Peer pressure on the global scale. Try thinking that you as a kid if you had any self control. Would you be able to control yourself?

"Imagine getting outsmarted by a f---ing 14 year-old" bet a lot of people felt the burn 😂

Kids are expected to do stupid decisions obviously, but there is a line to be crossed on how stupid especially when most of these insane harmful choices are the trends of an app people saw just to get internet points

I really appreciate you using your platform to discuss serious issues like this. It's really important to teach our children the dangers of the internet, what to be careful about, and how to deal with the personalities that you will run into online. I am constantly needing to tell my child that certain behaviors are not normal and that IN MOST CASES people do not act that way in real life as they do online and that it's NOT acceptable behavior. I am constantly asking who my son is playing with and how old they are, I monitor his messaging and his usage. I have played games WITH him that were completely created for children but adults played it too. They said complete pedophile remarks to him and when he got called out he said that my son was the fucked up one for using a voice changer....that was his excuse for calling him "daddy" (they called my son this) and saying a innuendo for sucking his dick (said to my son). My son was most definitely not using a voice changer as I explained he was my son, he is 8 ,and we are playing together. Sure we can say "well, he shouldn't be able to play online games that requires communication", but is that really fixing the problem? We need to protect them and create safe spaces and it shouldn't just be something we do in the real world but also actively do online. I do agree the government needs to be involved because I believe people need to be held responsible for their actions that would be considered ILLEGAL if done not online. It's the digital age, get with the program!

They parents do know a majority of the time and condone it. There are girls who are even younger and their parents are their social media "managers" who push the viewers to subscribe for "more exclusive content"

I've always felt like the phone companies need to implement their policies better. You should have to input legal data such as birth certificate to use the phone so they know your age and can more easily stop children from downloading these apps in the first place.

Say no to TikTok, just play WoW

I love you bro. I bet your mom is so proud of you. It all started w yall standing in line for the game and playing as a family and now you have evolved to advocating for children’s safety beyond WoW. Inspiring. Show the people that just bc your family plays a “nerd” game like wow that you guys find life and purpose in it. I dont like that everyone tried to tell people how to live their lives. If playing a game makes you happy and contentment then please guys do what you love. Just remember to take care of your body and mind :D i dont but the people around me that care for me do take great care of me lol ion got time to eat a salad when i got WoW to play!

i stay away from shorts cause i started to notice i can't watch a movie all the way through

On Asmons response to the self control part, now what about when you consume so much social media that your subconscious is all but programmed by what you consume. Like what if for some people all it takes is a hit before they become subconsciously addicted to the app and it influences everything you do? Kinda the whole reason all fast food places are red and yellow, those colors elicit hunger. And I know social media companies be researching how to keep you more engaged. And another thing is how come we regulate how much companies like juul and whatnot advertise to kids but not social media companies? Idk

Im like 31, I still remember as kids me and the bois would mock anything, dress like hitler, kkk, holocaust stuff, communists, it was just pure dark humor girls in my class would joke around about the shoes in concentration camps on a trip and shit we all grew out of it by late highschool expecting kids to be proper and conform to adult sensibilities just because they are online is stupid and not healthy in general.

I think the point the video is trying to make is that social media like tiktok exacerbates things to a higher degree than usual. Like yeah, we've always had pranks and kids doing stupid things but the reach and virality of social media like tiktok exposes it to more people and thus, more end up doing them. Which ends up being a bigger problem.

What makes tiktok worse than what has come before is how instant and rapid the new trends can develop. Before there would be like 5 challenges over the space of generations and would depend on how involved in the internet your friend group is, there could also been more depending on your locale. Everyone's heard of knock door bunk/run or fence hopping, those have been around since forever. When the iPhone first came out, challenges were easier to show your friends at school like the cinnamon challenge but it was unlikely your friends would be bothered to upload every challenger they recorded onto KZfaq and would be more like shared on Facebook for everyone at your school to be amused. Those challenges that came before are still on the same degree as they are now but they weren't as frequent, if something went horribly wrong then everyone in the area would've heard about it and it wouldn't of spread any further than that location but with tiktok, its totally the opposite. Eventually a challenge will go bad and when it does, its difficult to put the lid on it so more and more cases of the same stuff keeps happening and before you know it, a new challenge has popped up out of nowhere, one which is just as stupid.

What asmon said at 14:00 made me feel so much better I thought I was alone in this I feel like the pandemic held my speech and vocabulary back several years I noticed I was stumbling over my words all the time and it stated to worry me

I don't understand the appeal of tiktop. Tried it a few times and it felt like a waste of time. I wasn't entertained.

Man asks where are the parents? Working fam XD just trying to survive lmao

The attention span and memory issues are not unique to TikTok. I predominantely watch KZfaq and spend an unhealthy amount of time on it and I can say with some uneducated certainty, that my memory and attention has suffered from it.

This brings me to back when China enforced several rules for streaming platforms about soliciting donations from minors and cracked down super hard on streaming content as well as forcing the providers to further "sanitize" their algorithms... It made me realize that they probably collected all this data (probably because they are far more "effective" at it) and decided to do this way ahead of us in a far more forceful way. This was very poorly received by game streamers and content creators in the West but we forget that things this video outlined also existed and was probably the main focus of China's crackdown. I don't know what to think about the crackdown, I honestly don't know how to fight these despicable human filth without collateral. I don't know which side to pick on this...

I hate the argument that “kids have been doing this for years” somehow makes it okay.