Sydney Watson, in a recent vlog reasoned, “TikTok is deliberately poisoning a generation.”
The Australian journalist, who [rightly] regards the app as “quicksand for your brain,” exclaimed, “It’s pretty clear at this stage that [TikTok] is negatively impacting an entire generation of young people.”
The question is why? How? And by who’s behind it?
Motivated by a viral Substack piece, Watson unpacked author, Gurwinder’s main point.
TikTok, he argued is a “weapon of mass distraction.”
Summing up on Twitter where his argument lands, Gurwinder declared: “TikTok may have evolved into a Chinese bio-weapon to accelerate the West’s cognitive decline.”
Gurwinder says his viewpoint is solidified by “a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain’s gray matter, and ‘digital dementia.’”
“Digital dementia,” he explained is an “umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control (the last of which increases the addiction).”
The National Library of Medicine defines the term as, “cognitive impairment such as reduced attention and decreased memory span and can even expedite early-onset dementia.”
While acknowledging the dangers of excessive social media use, as a whole, Gurwinders said, TikTok was “uniquely dangerous.”
“If it’s the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy.”
Though TikTok “insists it’s not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” the CCP took a [controlling?] stake in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance during a crackdown in 2018.
At the same time an apology appeared from CEO Zhang Yiming in April that year, part of which read: “Our product took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values.”
Nodding to the influential power of social media, and how the CCP has its tentacles wrapped around TikTok, Gurwinder thus poses the question, “How likely is it that one such influence operation [psyop] might include addicting young Westerners to mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops?”
Supporting this proposition, Gurwinder points to Douyin – Chinese TikTok.
There are two versions of the app.
One approved by the State Commissars for the Children of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and one which looks like it’s designed to further corrupt Classical Liberalism’s kids in the West.
Leaning on research to explain the differences, Watson unpacks Douyin as educational, patriotic, age appropriate, and time limited.
Contrast Douyin with TikTok, and TikTok comes off looking like an “opioid” fed to entertain-me! addicted kids taught to follow, not think, by woke apologists, in an increasingly wokified West.
For Watson the two versions of TikTok are as distinct as Spinach and drugs.
By the very fact two versions of TikTok exist, says Watson, it’s clear the Chinese Communist Party know TikTok is toxic.
Therefore, Gurwinder has a point.
“Despite what TikTok appears to be on the surface,” Sydney argued, “the app used by millions of young people, [could be] causing brain Decay, and [it] might be happening deliberately.”
Kids using Douyin “want to be astronauts.” Kids hooked on TikTok, emulate the “influencers” they’re fed on the app.
The propositions have gravitas.
Klon Kitchen, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington DC think tank, is adamant that TikTok is a psyop.
In a thread on Twitter, posted in December, Kitchen called for the app to banned, stating, “TikTok is the most effective foreign psyop/espionage platform ever built and we’re swallowing it whole because it entertains us before it kills us? That’s like dancing up to the gallows because they’re playing your favourite song.”
Technology is a tool, not a toy.
Watson’s rundown, Gurwinder’s argument, and Kitchen’s inadvertent backing, offer a strong critique.
To paraphrase the three, TikTok is a timebomb.
Defusing it starts with individuals, because individual responsibility trumps new laws any day of the week.
As Ben Davis noted, “Husbands and fathers are to guard their families (Gen. 2:15), like a shepherd watching over his sheep (Ex. 22:10), like a watchman over a city (Isa. 62:6).”
Calling for discernment, Caldron Pool boss added, “Men, guard the windows and doors, but also guard the screens.”
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