Claim: TikTok is addicting

Question

A lot of people notice that when they open TikTok, they are appalled when they look at the time they spent on the app are hours later. Moments that feel like 30 minutes on the app are really 2 hours. According to BBC News, “A psychologist said the personalised algorithm on TikTok may be leading young people to get addicted. Dr Nia Williams, of Bangor University, said TikTok addictive because it releases dopamine into the brain, making it feel good.” (BBC News) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-62720657

Comments

I agree that tiktok is addictive because me and several friends have discussed this. We all can say that once we open tiktok, we find oursleves sitting on it for extended periods of time and getting too focused on the app to do anything else. The screetime feature on iphone shows how much time you spent on each app ad we all have very high times on tiktok.

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@ellenwagner going forward, please "answer" the claim using the corresponding button rather than comment on it. By doing so, you'll be able to have your fact-check upvoted and also be selected as the best answer.

As for your fact-check, it's nice to hear your personal analysis and experience, however, going forward you should include evidence and support from legitimate sources such as academia, scientific organizations, or the media and the source links, plus a detailed explanation, and a rating.

Answer 1

Yes, Tiktok is addictive for many reasons, their personalized feed, the trending dances and audios, shopping trends, and many more. Here is an article I found that goes more into depth as to why TikTok is so addicting.

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/body/health/a39964788/tiktok-addiction/

As stated by this article, the experience you get from using tiktok is similar to a slot machine at a casino because of the desire to keep scrolling and watching stuff you enjoy.

Answer 2

TikTok like many social media and content apps has the capacity to become addictive. There is only so much that self-control can do before you find yourself scrolling for hours on end to stimulate yourself. As stated by this article, addiction symptoms include the inability to stop using, negative health effects, and obsessive behaviors. Tiktok can become addictive thanks to its intense algorithms capable of collecting data and dispersing it to your "for you" feed at tremendous speeds. "Many social platforms use some variation of a recommendation algorithm to provide accurate content that fit the historic behaviors of its users. To spare you the details, TikTok is able to recommend you videos by what you and others have watched."

https://medium.com/dataseries/how-tiktok-is-addictive-1e53dec10867

Answer 3

The following article "What Makes TikTok so Addictive?" by Sophia Petrillo of Brown University not only confirms this claim but even takes the claim a step further, ranking consequences of such addiction by "degree of addiction." The study followed employees of 13 companies in Thailand, noticing that the results impacted their ability for high functioning in the work place, writing that social media addiction "may reduce productivity and success in work, education, and other areas of life. It even affects coping mechanisms, including those with handling stress.

RESEARCH LINK - https://sites.brown.edu/publichealthjournal/2021/12/13/tiktok/

The next article, "How TikTok is Addictive" by Medium, examines the psychological impacts even further. The article, written in 2020, writes that even then the app had over 800 millions active users a month, which out performs any other social media platform. This number again was from over two years ago now. I think this is extremely important to recognize, because the algorithm on TikTok has such an extensive engagement feedback forum to base data off of and better curate feeds and interest groupings. With this kind of feedback, the content is more well curated than other social media platforms that simply do not have this kind of engagement. The article feeds into this idea, writing that "These algorithms are able to predict the preferences that you would give to a piece of content based on the activity of similar users to you." As opposed to curating a feed based only on your personal feedback to videos, using data from users who share similar interests and interact in similar ways allows the algorithm to pretty accurately predict whether or not this will be something of interest to you. This extremely specific curations are what keep users so invested for long periods of time, as the content continues to entertain and stays relevant even when large amounts of time have passed.

RESEARCH LINK - https://medium.com/dataseries/how-tiktok-is-addictive-1e53dec10867