I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie and I need this US ban

NEW YORK – My friends and I never thought this day would come. The daily routines of more than 170 million Americans have been disrupted by a nationwide TikTok ban.

On the bright side, my homework will get done a lot quicker.

Every day, I get home from school around 3.30pm, with a list of assignments that, if I am focused, should take until 6pm to complete. But I do not usually end up finishing them until 11pm. Why? TikTok.

It all starts at 3.45pm, when I typically flop down on my bed and open the app for “just a minute”. But by the time I get up from bed, that “minute” has swelled into several hours.

At the moment I am writing this, I could instead distract myself by looking at an orange Muppet-like monster detailing an outlandish and embarrassing story from a non-puppet person’s life. I will “like” one video, comment on another and keep my thumb moving.

I open the comments on each to laugh and commiserate with others. Often, the harmony in our responses creates the illusion of community – even though we are each very much alone with our phones.

I love TikTok so much that I cannot imagine a life without it. And yet, I desperately need a life without it.

This app has infiltrated American culture.

The national TikTok ban, which entered into force on Jan 19,

was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court on Jan 17.

Now, the Google and Apple app stores will be penalised for carrying it and the app has gone dark.

Former President Joe Biden has indicated he will leave enforcement of the ban up to the new administration. It still remains to be seen whether President Donald Trump will be able to halt the prohibition.

Given my love of TikTok, you might think the notion of losing it would horrify me and, yet, it fills me with hope. You see, I am a 17-year-old TikTok junkie, and I wholeheartedly support a law that would sever me forever from my fix.

My support for this ban has nothing to do with national security. I do not know whether my name, e-mail address and phone number are stored in Washington, Texas or China. Perhaps I should care more about that, but what worries me most right now is the future of my generation.

This app defines people my age, dictates our conversations, chooses our outfits and determines what we buy.

In 2024, TikTok directed me to wear cheetah prints: Suddenly, those animal likenesses ran all my other clothes out of the apartment. Then, it was low-rise jeans only.

One morning, I woke up to discover that the feed had been invaded by stylish girls – like the teenage influencer Demetra – wearing denim that shows off midriffs and flares out at the bottom.

To finish off the look, social media mandated a slicked-back bun. Nothing screams “clean girl aesthetic” like this hairstyle. And “clean girl aesthetic” is something I learnt on TikTok as well.

Almost every dinner and lunch out starts with whatever is viral on TikTok. The app is my generation’s search engine. “Where should we go for sushi?” “I don’t know. Look it up on TikTok.”

Should TikTok permanently end, we teenagers will not just lose an app full of funny dances or silly memes. We will surrender a way of being, a fundamental cornerstone of youth culture.

But that is precisely why we need to give it up. This app has pervaded every corner of our consciousness.

According to some estimates, more than half of the weekly active TikTok users are between the ages of 18 and 34, and the average young adult spends more than an hour a day on the app, with some topping two hours.

If it seems TikTok knows exactly what we want to see, it is because it does. The algorithm keeps roughly half of America – and a substantial portion of its young adult population – hooked.

We teenagers cannot stop following. And sometimes what we see is not what we want to see at all. The algorithm knows who we want to be and what we want to look like, and it gives us more of the same.

In these videos, we come face to face with our most fundamental insecurities and yearning to be accepted. Perfect people lip sync our favourite songs 24 hours a day. Popular people show us the parties that we are missing. Our friends post about hanging out without us.

The algorithm picks at our self-esteem, and it becomes a scab that just will not heal. How can we look away?

My father recently told me about a famous public service commercial from the 1980s showing a sizzling egg in a frying pan and comparing the egg to a brain on drugs.

With TikTok, I cannot help but wonder about what our brains might have done with all the time we have dedicated to staring at our screens. Our sleep, our waking hours and our thoughts are surrendered to content creators collecting money off our time – and to the coffers of ByteDance itself.

All of my inside jokes with my friends come from whatever is trending on TikTok. Recently, we laughed about memes involving actress Lily-Rose Depp and the phrase “trench coat buttoned to the top”. My vocabulary is also modelled on everyone else’s.

One person alone deleting TikTok does not do much. Everyone around us still uses it. I have tried deleting it myself, and I end up downloading it again soon enough.

But an all-out ban could do the trick. Eggs cannot uncook, but our brains could heal from the damage inflicted if we collectively stop using TikTok. NYTIMES