Toxic TikTok Trends
By Izzy Smith, Devon Luce, and Swastik Siwakoti
You open TikTok and start scrolling through your “For You Page.” All you see are perfect girls with flawless hair, faces, and bodies. Before you know it, your thoughts are flooded with self-hatred and anxiety. These girls fit perfectly into the westernized idea of beauty, and you can’t help but compare yourself to how they look. This is something that many students experience on a daily basis, and they are slowly starting to realize how addictive and harmful TikTok can really be.
“There’s a lot of body checking on TikTok,” said senior Iman Khan. Body checking is the obsessive urge to seek information on your appearance, weight, size, often done through videos or images. Another user, senior Sophia Vitek, said, “Once you’re on TikTok, it’s really hard to get off of it, which is really toxic.”
With TikTok becoming more and more popular, there has been a prevalent rise in toxic trends, specifically ones that touch on fatphobia and eating disorders. “Toxic” defines certain trends, videos, images, and more that may be interpreted in a harmful way. Though TikTok says it has implemented a few regulations on what content users can post — specifically content that may be triggering to certain individuals — there is still an excessive amount of problematic trends that circulate.
The idea of fatphobia and diet culture in all forms of media has been around since the early 1920s and 1940s, especially with the rise in capitalism. Advertisements about diet trends turned into a multi-million dollar industry, solely based on the tactic of informing women that their bodies didn’t reach society’s standards.
“There’s always been social pressures, particularly put on women and their bodies, from the time of photography and ads, and even prior to that,” said mental health counselor Shelly Ball.
TikTok offers a wide range of filters for users to use, but one in particular sends a toxic message to people that don’t have western society’s perfect body. The trend consists of the user walking into the frame using a filter — now taken down by TikTok — that alters their body to make it appear larger. After a couple seconds, the user takes the filter off of their body. Their body appears to be back to its original appearance and the once-present body dysmorphia is allegedly gone.
“There are so many problematic parts, not just the body image parts; all the filters that are only designed for white faces, making P.O.C. look white — it’s all very toxic. And it’s all so unrealistic,” said mental health counselor Simone Kertesz.
These toxic trends heavily contribute to the mental illnesses that stem from phones in general.
“Ever since students have had phones in their pockets, the rates of anxiety and depression have gone straight up. We have crises everyday because of what’s going on online,” said Kertesz.
Subsequently, the rates of eating disorders has increased tremendously throughout the pandemic, specifically because of the “What I Eat In a Day” videos that can be found on TikTok. In fact, the National Eating Disorders Association received “a spike of more than 70% in the number of calls and online chat inquiries” from 2019 to 2020.
Shelly believes that getting rid of these toxic trends may be harder than most people think, especially because of the capitalistic aspect of the beauty industry.
“It will be difficult to counter the effects of social media without outside regulation, because there is so much money to be made off of it,” she said.
Despite the overwhelming amount of negativity on TikTok, many believe that it is possible to eliminate the problems and continue to promote awareness on the acceptance of all shapes, sizes, and more.
“Continuing to promote Black, Brown, non-binary, gender fluid, investing in people that are not part of the dominant culture and giving them a platform [is so important],” said Kertesz.
