Teens Should Be Careful about TikTok Challenges

By now, most of us have at least heard of TikTok, a social network through which people create and share short videos that can be edited directly in the app. TikTok, which was created by the Chinese company ByteDance in 2016, offers users many ways to customize and create innovative content, including music, filters, stickers, and other features. In 2018, TikTok was the most downloaded app globally on the Apple app store, and today, there are more than 800 million TikTokers everywhere.

One aspect of TikTok that has contributed to its success are TikTok “challenges,” in which users are invited to participate in things like dubbing famous movie themes or scenes, dancing to iconic songs, or demonstrating a unique skill. Unfortunately, some of the challenges can actually hurt their participants because they lead people to do risky things like taking medicine, playing with electricity, or gluing body parts together using super glues.

One example of these dangerous challenges is the “Benadryl Challenge,” which encourages users to take large doses of the medication to induce hallucinations. As a consequence, many children and teens have overdosed with the medication, which led Johnson & Johnson, Benadryl’s manufacturer, to post a warning about the challenge in its official channels.

Another harmful challenge is the “Blackout Challenge,” also known as the "choking game," which involves cutting off a person's air supply until he or she loses consciousness. Earlier this year, a 10-year-old girl died while participating in this challenge.

At first, it may seem hard to understand why young people would participate in games that could have horrible consequences. But then I remember how my friends and I used to do something similar when we were teenagers, before TikTok. We often felt pressured to do things we didn't want to do to please our peers and feel like we belonged, even if the price of belonging was putting ourselves in danger.

“We all want to feel like we're connected, and long before TikTok, copying others was a way of learning, showing affiliation and loyalty,” psychologist Pamela Rutledge wrote in a recent Psychology Today article. “Belonging is a powerful motivator and ‘peer acceptance’ can amplify appeal with the promise of inclusion,” she continued. “These pressures can short circuit rational thought and leave no room for consideration to the harm or risk a challenge might present. And with social isolation, there are also no groups of friends on hand to call for help if something goes wrong.”

In addition, users succeed on platforms like TikTok based on a system that ranks users based on likes, comments, and shares. This social validation and the prospect of becoming popular not only among our friends, but also to a global audience, can lead people to do whatever they can to get attention. “Popularity tells our primitive brains that something is of value unless we stop and question it,” Rutledge noted. “The adolescent brain is vulnerable to these pitfalls of social influence because they don't have the cognitive maturity to question the challenge or consider the consequences.”

But Rutledge also notes that TikTok challenges can be a positive tool to make teen users feel connected and engaged, especially during the pandemic's social isolation. That type of connection can healthily take the form of challenges that encourage TikTok users to grow and be creative, such as the #artchallenge, which invites artists to share their creations, or super fun dance challenges, such as the Renegade, which became well known in 2020 for inviting people to dance to a song in a series of super complex steps. Some challenges even seek to generate healthier habits among users, like inviting them to drink more water or exercise.

In short, TikTok can be a great platform on which young people can express themselves and share their skills and creativity with the world. But it’s important that young people take care not to fall prey to a heightened form of peer pressure that can seriously hurt them.