Do you know how many times I’ve heard the “designed to exploit the dopamine pathways” line? You know how much proof I’ve seen for that? Zilch, nada, nothing. Not a single source is ever provided to back that claim. Does that automatically mean it’s a false claim? No, but it’s definitely suspicious. From my limited time looking into it for myself all I can see is that TikTok does, in fact, produce a dopamine response. That’s it. None of the (very few, this is an under-researched subject) studies I have found even differentiate it from other sources of dopamine. Hell, one of the articles I saw used the amount of time a fucking hashtag stays on the trending list as an indicator of the degradation of attention spans. I trust I don’t have to explain how those two are only superficially linked.
Tik Tok’s design clearly taps into psychological principles that drive addiction. The infinite scroll and unpredictable content rewards work like slot machines in a dopamine-driven feedback loop. This keeps users glued to their screens, often without realizing how much time has passed. The For You feed continuously adapts to like a million data tracking points, and spits out a constant stream of whatever content it deems most likely to keep you scrolling. Neuroscientists have pointed out that heavy TikTok use can reduce attention spans and increase the need for instant gratification which are effects tied to dopamine stimulation. Obviously bytedance isn’t going to publicize the proprietary research they used to accomplish this. But the app clearly uses these engagement-maximizing techniques. That also goes for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit (they wish lol) and the rest of them. But in tiktok’s case, it’s an export from an adversarial nation, and you only need to look at the internally approved version of tiktok for Chinese users, which promotes a completely different kind of content.
Which neuroscientists are saying that? All the articles I’ve found referring to “TikTok Brain” quote one Dr. Patrick Porter. And I have become quite wary of trusting one man’s word, even that of a professional, since the whole vaccines cause autism thing.
Here are several studies, I have not read all of them but they are what I found:
https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/items/277e3219-85d2-41ac-92f3-4ac3745c1d58
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8820
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.641673/full
https://theoxfordblue.co.uk/tiktok-and-the-death-of-the-attention-span/
These articles and studies may be of interest to you
https://sites.brown.edu/publichealthjournal/2021/12/13/tiktok/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8010681/
https://www.psychreg.org/double-tap-dopamine-science-social-media-likes-impact-minds/
You have linked a term paper, one study, and two articles. The study is a meta analysis that refuses to comment on the detrimental effects of TikTok usage due to a lack of research in the field in general. One article is about social media use in general and does not directly link to any scholarly works. The other does directly target TikTok and links to a study on Chinese students. There, TikTok Use Disorder was positively correlated with memory loss, anxiety, stress, and depression. Unfortunately my understanding of statistical analysis is not strong enough to judge the quality of the study, but to my limited knowledge it seems robust for its purposes. That being said, positive correlation does not necessarily prove causation. Notably, this study was a one time questionnaire. Meaning there isn’t any mechanism to determine the effects of high TikTok usage over time.
All this is to say that the field is deeply understudied, and that there aren’t any reliable conclusions that can be drawn yet. It may be that there are adverse effects, but that has yet to be proven.
So what you’re saying is: We have a small sample of unreliable evidence that this thing may be absolutely detrimental to the developing brain. Thus, we should assume it’s fine until we have more reliable evidence. Did I get that right?
