My 13-year-old cousin stopped posting dance clips on TikTok last week
I was scrolling through her old videos last night, eating cold pepperoni pizza off a crumpled paper plate, because I forgot to put the leftovers away yesterday. She had 1200 something followers, most of them other kids who also post K-pop dance covers in their bedrooms. She practiced that NewJeans routine for three straight weeks, texted me every other day to send rough cuts, asked me three separate times if her blue hair clip matched her oversized jeans. She tripped over her own foot at the end of the final take, snort-laughed at the camera, and just posted it anyway, caption “oops my bad balance strikes again.” That was the last thing she posted public.
Three days later, she texted me at 2 a.m. crying so hard half the messages were just typos and broken emojis. People were stitching it. I clicked the link she sent, and there was this 14-year-old girl with 40k followers who’d dropped Lila’s clip into a “worst teen dance fails of the week” compilation, made a joke about “why do people even post this if they can’t hit the step.” When I scrolled through the comments on that stitch, there were hundreds of them, most from other kids: jokes about her thighs, people saying she should stop embarrassing herself, even a bunch of lies that she’d stolen the choreography from a bigger creator, even though Lila always tagged the original choreographer in her caption. I reported a dozen of the worst ones that night, and TikTok only took down two. Said the rest didn’t violate community guidelines.
I drove over to her house after work the next day. She was curled up on her window seat under that giant Hello Kitty blanket she’s had since third grade, the one with the coffee stain on the corner from when she spilled iced coffee at Christmas last year. She picked at a loose thread the whole time I was there, wouldn’t look me in the eye, wouldn’t come out for the tacos her mom ordered. Her mom was pacing the living room, going on about just delete the app, who cares what strangers think, and I get that impulse, I really do. But I also remember being 14 and getting bullied on old Instagram, and deleting your account doesn’t make the videos disappear, doesn’t unmake the fact that everyone at your school already saw them. That same day, a girl from Lila’s math class came up to her between periods and pretended to trip over her own feet, just to joke about the clip. Lila said she wanted to move schools. She said everyone was looking at her.
I looked through the accounts of the people leaving the worst comments, out of curiosity I guess. Most of them are 12 to 16, same age as Lila. It’s not the creepy 40-year-old stranger everyone warns you about, it’s just other kids. One of the top mean comments was from a 13-year-old boy who lives 20 minutes away at the other middle school, and his page is full of his own skateboarding fails, he posts them laughing like it’s no big deal, and half the comments on his videos are people calling him a dork too. It feels like this weird messed up cycle, right? Everyone’s already getting picked on, so they pass it on, because behind a screen you don’t see the girl crying under a Hello Kitty blanket. You just get 200 likes for a mean one-liner, and that feels good when you’re 13 and no one pays much attention to you most of the time.
I’ve been on TikTok for three years. I use it to watch pottery tutorials, videos of people rescuing stray cats, those oddly satisfying clips where guys rebuild rusted old tractors. I post my own wonky handmade mugs, and people mostly say nice things. I’ve always rolled my eyes when older people go on about how TikTok is destroying kids, how every new app is the end of the world—when I was a kid it was MySpace, then Instagram, it’s always something. But this does feel different, doesn’t it? The whole app is built on reacting to other people’s content. Duets and stitches put your response right next to the original clip. It’s so easy to chop up 15 seconds of a kid being silly, turn it into free content for your own page, rack up likes, and never think about what happens to that kid after you hit post.
Lila set her account to private last night. She posted one last public clip before that, just her sitting on her bed, no dance, no music, caption “I’m not posting anymore, leave me alone.” I commented “love you” and she liked it, that’s it. Her mom still keeps saying she should just delete the whole app, cut it out entirely, and I don’t know what the right answer is. If she deletes, those kids win, right? But if she stays, she has to scroll past that stupid compilation every time someone tags her, every time she opens the app.
I don’t have a big inspirational wrap-up here. I don’t have a list of things parents should do, or how TikTok should fix it, or any of that. I just know that when I was 13, the worst hurt wasn’t even the mean words themselves. It was the fact that everyone I knew saw them, and I couldn’t unsee them, and I still think about that stupid group page people made making fun of me, 15 years later. Now it’s just bigger, faster, easier for a hundred random kids to pile on a 13-year-old who just wanted to post a silly dance clip and make a few friends who like the same music as her. That’s all I got. It sucks, and I don’t know how to fix it. I just hope she eventually forgets how bad it felt, faster than I did.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » My 13-year-old cousin stopped posting dance clips on TikTok last week