Bobby D'Angelo
Over the initial lockdown, I was arguing over whether or not my friend Toby is gay for having a series of dreams about Timothee Chalamet with homosexual overtones chilling with boys deleting some beers, when I heard one of my friends say something that you would only say in the close proximities of a trusted friend group. Tik Tok really needs to have some sort of verification setting where I can see that someone is 18, before watching her video…because that app is a DANGEROUS game. He’s right. He may feel too afraid of being ostracized to say it out in public, and you may feel that way too, but we are all thinking the same thing. Don’t believe me?
Ahead of the world’s most famous musicians, athletes, politicians, FUCKING BETTY WHITE. Do you know how many times a year I google Betty White just to make sure she’s still alive?! At least six.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of funny shit on Tik Tok, but I would barely use it without doing so for work. The app is flawlessly designed for a generation that was allowed to use their iPads at the dinner table and sorority girls with ADD, but I’d rather watch something that lasts at least a little bit longer than I do without wearing a condom.The fact that the human attention span has fallen to this level is weird to think about. What’s next? Six-second videos of shirtless teens doing violently unfunny prank challenges to sell tickets to events where they hug prepubescent girls? Oh shit, nevermind.
We need Tik Tok to start being responsible here. The inherent problem is that Tik Tok made its success off of kids 12-18, and like anything else that should stay the way it is, corporations went in and saw the marketing opportunity of a lifetime. I would bet my testicle (the one without nerve damage) that there is a thirty-four-year-old dude that, like me, spends four hours of his day trying to weed out hundreds of videos of people dancing to Mood by 24kGoldn. I mean, Jesus Christ, OnlyFans made $400 million in revenue this year, and it seems like one of the only surefire ways to get attention on the world’s hottest app is to either shake your ass or take shirtless videos of you and four other white guys pretending to be friends. We live in a society where nobody ever ‘fesses up to their hornyness. We hop on our computers and phones, working every day without knowing whether or not the people we’re trusting with our banking information are responsible for this girl being on PornHub’s homepage.
I think I’m an average guy…which I guess means I’m only just kind of a perv?? I would never watch a girl in high school dance provocatively for some clout, but sometimes I’m trapped because I don’t know. This leaves me in a situation where I’m playing roulette and then I feel the need to dig so I assure myself I didn’t do anything wrong. Is what I’m doing wrong? No age in bio? Boyfriend maybe? College Sweatshirt? WHY AM I SCROLLING? STOP SCROLLING!! WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?! And that’s me…not the forty-seven-year-old guy that can’t step within 500 feet of a school.
We’ve popularized a paradise for predators. Through renegades and commercials that make the app look far more diverse than it actually is, we have a situation where too many people have too much access to girls born after Elf was in theaters shaking their ass for Instagram followers. There needs to be a checkmark and some regulations, or I think Charli D’Amelio’s Dad is going to finally fall off the deep end.
That is a man who is dead on the inside.
