Your Teen Signed Up For War & You Never Even Realized
Our imaginations of warfare may look like the trenches of World War 1, storming the French beaches of World War 2 or kicking-in steel doors to sand huts for close quarters combat in the Middle East. Hats off to everyone who has the fortitude and strength to fight that fight. But, those days–with the emergence of technology–may be behind us.
Technology is quite clever. It allows entry into your enemy’s territory without ever having to kick in a door, call an airstrike or throw a hand grenade. Although it takes longer, you can create amazing destruction by the use of one thing: information. The information can be misinformation, lies, deceit, propaganda, torment and subtly destroy the morale, motivation and culture of your target country. It’s perfectly legal. There’s nothing visceral to this process. A professor teaching a treasonous lesson that only your enemy in a cave could utter is not a crime in a country like the United States, whereas a car bomb creates immediate sensations of hate towards the perpetrator.
Even better than a talking primate in a classroom though, is no person present at all. It’s much better if you can bring the people to them, at all times. What if you could create an app with the goal of swaying public perception, taking them away from sound principles, philosophy, responsible habits and shower them with non-sensical misguiding pathways. Better yet, your technological intervention tool can be passed off as being a great thing by the targets themselves! They may view it as a healthy investment opportunity, it may create many jobs or it may keep citizens satisfied (like bread and circuses). You’ve convinced your target enemy to adore their destruction. Perhaps TikTok and similar apps could be such a tool. [Do you believe in mind control? It exists. Subscribe to find out].
The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting
Many have been critical of the data collection by TikTok & the ability for it to quite literally hack your phone–there is a major cyber security element here but I’m not talking about that. I’m referring to TikTok’s capacity to act as a subversive tool to damage one’s psyche, particularly the younger. This ultimately comes back to Yuri Bezmenov’s interview, an Ex-KGB agent who warned Americans in 1984 of subversion [I invite you to click here if you haven’t seen it] regarding ideological subversion.
TikTok has an amazing 1 BILLION users, but perhaps more distressing is that a third of them are 14 years and younger. This has motivated some recent research (most being completed in the last year or so) to study its impacts. One study (Rutherford el al, 2022) sought to explore cannabis-related content on TikTok. Their examination outlined that over half of all marijuana use was demonstrated positively (of these positive portrayals, they received 417 Million views) which was completely independent of age. Furthermore, 71.74% of their findings showed marijuana as entertaining and humorous and nearly 1/4 of all content passed it off as culturally acceptable.
You’re missing the point if you think this is a rant on those damn lazy pot smokers; rather, it’s about promoting drug-use in the youth of your enemy (China makes it well known they view their primary enemy as the United States of America). Someone can be productive and learn a new skill, or take it easy with friends and a joint–like I said, the process is slow.
While this just looks at marijuana presentation & views, another study looked more holistically at mental health and TikTok content. Basch, Donnelle, Fera & Jaime, 2022 evaluated over 100 TikTok videos that contained the hashtag #mentalhealth. They were interested in the nature of the content–whether it discussed self-harm, suicide, self-help, hospitalization, coping strategies and so on. The total number of the views on these 100 videos amounted to amazing 1.354 Billion with nearly 267M likes. Each videos averaged 24,910 comments. Of all this numerous interaction, about half (which would be 500 MILLION views) reported or expressed signs of mental distress. Age was not a studied variable.
Speaking of views, make sure to Click ‘ARTICLES’ above and view lots of other content! Always more to come!
In a quite unique study completed by Wallner et al, 2022, looked at interethnic influencing factors regarding buttocks body imagine in women and social media. Their sample was drawn from Nigeria, Germany, USA and Japan. Overall they found that there was a highly significant correlation between viewership of Instagram, TikTok and pornography and negative perception of women’s own buttocks. Again, it has nothing to do with US Butts–it’s about destabilizing the psyche of your enemy.
As further evidence that TikTok content disturbs one’s psyche, a study in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth (Feijoo, Sadaba & Zozaya, 2022) found that despite the millions and millions of users with billions and billions of views, distrust is baked into the cake. They found that both parents and children had a “distrust by default” position & were able to identify erroneous material (although parents doubted their child’s ability in spotting this). Can it be said it is healthy for an entire population viewing content that they immediately view with distrust? How might this effect their own relationships? There’s a study waiting…
And if you thought 14 was quite young–it goes younger. According to Young Consumers journal, Bossen & Kottasz, 2020 wanted to research the use patterns & sought gratifications by pre-adolescent & adolescent TikTok’ers (is that a noun now?). While they found that consumption behaviour of both of these groups was significant, it was pre-adolescent groups who had a heightened level of activity. The authors attributed this by ‘a wish to expand ones social-network, fame-seeking, self-expression and identity-creation’. They later cautioned that this leaves this group vulnerable to online predators & lack of privacy.
Closing
Knowing concretely the effects of specifically TikTok is tough to say. There are many studies with inconclusive results that I wasn’t able to mention here. It’s a relatively unstudied area, but some researchers have expressed concern regarding myopia (short-sightedness), anxiety, dietary habits and addiction with its usage. That’s always a problem, by the time the study is completed and there’s enough reaffirmed evidence to suggest that a set of variables all point in one direction–the damage has been done to your kid.
However, I think one should be asking themselves: is the adoption of this technology ensuring that American youth (or any youth for that matter) will be more upstanding, educated, moral, focused and successful individuals? Again, no studies have been completed, but you know my hypothesis and I think I know yours.
I believe we should be cautious about new forms of technology & their content because while they may look inviting, they very well could be weaponized to our own or children’s detriment. The battle field is not a field anymore per sé–it is cyber space–an intangible notional environment in which engagements occur over networks. This change has substituted bullets for information, trained killers for unsuspecting malleable minds and young men in uniform for entire populations of adolescence.
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