Tik Tok, a media-based platform to update kids, teenagers, and even adults on recent trends, and for fun dances. But there is also a dark side of the fun, trend-following platform, The Challenges. Kids, teens, and even adults are following these “Harmful” challenges. The challenges are slowly getting worse. For example, In August the challenge was to make it across stacked milk crates and not fall. WeAreTeachers.com states “Last month, TikTok banned the Milk Crate Challenge from their platform. If you’re curious, a quick YouTube search will reveal a bunch of people filming themselves or their friends falling painfully to the ground after stacking milk crates into a pyramid and trying to walk over it.” But, before this became viral another challenge came into view, the Cha Cha Slide challenge. This is where people would follow the directions from the song the Cha Cha Slide, by DJ Casper in the car. Weareteachers.com also says “There were also other more alarming trends—the Benadryl Challenge, the Blackout Challenge, and so on. Now, it seems like the latest dangerous TikTok challenge has emerged almost from out of nowhere. Most students call it “Devious Licks” and it’s directly aimed at schools.” This shows that Tiktok is more dangerous than we think. This new “Devious Licks” challenge has kids vandalizing and stealing school property.
You may think that this is funny, possibly harmless, however, it encourages students to steal from school and see how much they can get away with. Weareteacher.com says “ Most of the stolen items have been small, like soap dispensers, hand sanitizers, rolls of paper towels, or boxes of masks. Other students, however, have pushed the trend to its limit stealing much larger items. These larger Devious licks include kids stealing computers, smart boards, projectors, etc. They are all captioned with “Had the most devious lick at school today.” This shows that kids are trying to push past the believable limits. But that’s not all. Even though they steal, they vandalize schools. I have witnessed this myself, I have seen kids drawing in the bathroom stalls with permanent markers, pens, and pencils. www.cnbc.com says “ TikTok says 1 billion people use the app each month” The challenge’s change monthly, October is to assault a teacher, yeah, you heard me assault a teacher. This challenge is to go up to a teacher and either verbally assault them, or physical assault. I don’t mean start a fistfight in the lunchroom with teachers, I mean go up and slap them. I have had teachers tell the whole classroom that if this were to happen to them they would send the student down to the police officer downstairs and press charges. I can only imagine how bad next month’s challenge is, just imagine all arrest warrants, or charges pressed. So my opinion is that Tik Tok should ban all of these challenges when they first arise. This way they don’t continue further on and spread. Or even better ban the users that create and promote these dangerous challenges.
