[Music] [Applause] when I first started using Tick Tock it was just like people dancing or like joke videos that's what were most of my videos until later I just felt isolated from all my friends my family Tick Tock was kind of just there and then it would just get even lonely and lonelier I had no idea that it would make me end up here let's talk about tech talk anxiety depression and eating disorders the social media giant conceals the dangers of its app especially to children to think what these companies are doing what they know they're doing and the harms that are being caused in the real world are horrific horrific the families of two little girls say tick tock caused their deaths tick tock's algorithm keeps young people scrolling little is known about the potential mental health impacts it may happen they have operated under the belief that they are immune Tick Tock is repeatedly chosen the path for more control more surveillance and more manipulation and they've pulled the wool over all of our eyes we will keep safety particularly for teenagers as a top priority for us algorithm has one main goal you need to watch even more videos if you can control the algorithm then you can also control the mental health of a user and if you cannot control the algorithm take-toe needs to be shut down [Music] thank you I'm Olivia Carvel I am a reporter on Bloomberg's investigations team I've been writing about the intersection of technology companies and child safety I've been reporting on Tech talk for about a year now largely writing about safety policies that the app has but what I really wanted to understand was the actual impact on the users themselves so we know that Tech talk has been a punching bag in Silicon Valley over the last few years there's a lot of concern about this app almost every day if you check Google something new pops up I'm seeing a lot of headlines around data privacy around the security risks of the app and another thing that comes up time and time again in these headlines is child safety concerns what is the mental health impact of using an app like tick tock I want to try and answer that question I want to understand is Tick Tock safe for kids and what are some of the consequences of tumbling into a rabbit hole on this app please what baby what's going on all right we need coats for you too here Bob you got it all right let's go all the front door loves What drew me to this work is that it needs to be done I'll see you later I'll be back I'll be right back [Music] our children are dying they're suffering they're developing harmful dependencies on these products they're experiencing unprecedented rates of depression anxiety suicide and these products need to change give me a kiss love you Laura Marquez Garrett is an attorney based with the social media victims Law Center the seattle-based law firm which is essentially trying to raise the question of liability should these big technology companies be held liable for the harms that they are causing to children hello come on in good to see you so what's been happening lately it has not been happening lately same same I'm just busy and a lot of families a lot of work we have over 1400 clients right now it's crazy because the center's only been around for what 18 months if even yeah and do you have families reaching out to you directly to talk I do you can see this pattern where you have a kid often a kid that is doing just fine and you introduce that social media element and things just go downhill The Tick Tock cases tend to be the dependencies that these kids develop where they just feel they can't live without it you know you will have a teenager who's for you Paige is just flooded with suicide content advocating violence against others we see that disordered eating is a big one it will be massive amounts of video targeted on a vulnerability that the technology has identified how do you actually visualize the landscape of social media harm what does it look like in your mind it's huge it's the designs it's the marketing it's the programming these products are tools whereby if a child gets an account these companies are using these tools to Target these children I mean we see kids all the time who will tell us and and you can see it for the ones that are dead you can see it in their data from the ones that are here they will tell us like I wasn't looking for this stuff I can't tell you I can't tell you like the way we feel when a new client comes through and their child has passed away recently and it's not I know we're not responsible but there's this sense of like we have to do this we have to get this done because it's happening every day and I will tell you that the outcomes where some of these children survive can be just as bad these are children whose childhood is gone Tick Tock was already pre-downloaded on my first phone all my friends had tick tocks accounts and they were making videos and it was just some seemed like something that would be fun I think my first like recollection of like the shift in my for you page was really just like I started getting like healthy recipes you should start and then it turned into how to make your legs thinner and then it turned into what I eat in a day with these girls that I thought I should look like of course it made me feel like I was eating too much and like what my body should look like and just that I wasn't enough because I didn't look like these other girls or I wasn't doing what they said I should be doing I do not remember searching any of that stuff at all and then it was there I found a little icon for the for you page it made me visibly Shake I stood in the kitchen for less than 30 seconds and probably saw 50 images it was disordered eating body dysmorphia binging showing pictures of what it looked like to be anorexic self-harm it was all over her feed we thought we were telling her the right things and we thought we were doing the right things and unfortunately I did not know that I was working against the forces coming through her phone I need to have your child's 13th birthday party on a Sunday and Monday to see your child hospitalized for a life-threatening disease was heart-wrenching and for us that was our Rock Bottom as a family foreign we had our first official appointment with a medical provider and first a nursing student came in to take her heart rate and I saw the pause and I saw them do the heart rate again and then I saw the nurse come in and I saw the same thing in the afternoon I saw her phone call come across the doctor said that Katie needed to be hospitalized and my husband asked the question of well how soon do we need to get her there they said you need to admit her now you need to go pick her up from school so we drove to school to pick Katie up and um called the school and Katie was released and then my husband and I looked at each other and we thought what if she doesn't come home and what if she dies there and so we called my son out and we asked my son to come out too so we could explain it to him and then Katie got in the car and where did you think you were going Florida she thought we were surprising the kids with the trips of Florida and she looked in the back and saw that there was only one suitcase and knew that she was getting it [Music] Katie's a pretty remarkable young woman she feels a sense of empowerment by talking about her experience and she really feels like Tick Tock is to blame here she's filing a lawsuit arguing that the platform is liable for what happened to her we're aware of many cases where children like Katie have tumbled down this eating disordered rabbit hole and she is not alone in her experience [Music] custom like why they directly sent me these video actually of my age and that I was a girl like why why me if Katie had a coach or a teacher that was encouraging these behaviors they would be fired we wouldn't allow somebody to stand in front of children and give them this information [Music] the fact has an algorithm that was purposeful in sending harmful content to a child that's irresponsible [Music] foreign what is powering this product the concern is no one really knows this is a document that I'm looking at it's called Tick Tock algo 101 it was actually written internally and effectively tries to explain to the product guys or the human moderators how it works there is a an equation here that they've outlined trying to explain to these teams what the algorithm is doing what it's learning of these users to deliver you an endless stream of content that it thinks you want to see that's tick tock's magic Source here but through reading this what I've come to understand is it doesn't really tell us anything this has lead to some chaotic frustrating situations for Insiders I think one of the most telling things we actually have in this 18-page document is a line on the front page that says our ultimate goal is to increase daily active users so even if inside the company their trust and safety teams which are set up to try and protect kids are encouraging them to develop create enhance safety measures the company's ultimate objective is actually working against that [Music] I'm Charles I'm 20 years old I'm from Germany I ended up working for a tick tock at the age of 18. most of the time is when I worked at tiktok I did workshops so I had the chance to really interact with many advertisers in the german-speaking region I saw that my for you feed tremendously changed in a time of a week or two every time I enter the workshop I was in need to switch to a second Tick Tock account because my personal Tick Tock account was so dark and sad that I don't want to really share any of this content [Music] what I saw in my feed is more and more depressional suicide and self-harmful content came on this is not somebody saying I want to kill myself it's maybe somebody sitting in a dark room crying and a text saying I don't want to live anymore you really get affected by that quite hard Tick Tock collects a lot of data when it comes down to the videos that you consume and all the metrics that you give to Tick Tock by consuming more and more content on the platform the most important factor for the algorithm clearly is watch time but it also comes down to a topic called retention which is based on the interactions that you give to a certain video and to a certain Channel I personally made an experiment where I opened up a new tick tock account and tried to check on how much time would it take for me to open up an account that's just filled with sad quotes and it took me 17 minutes to have a pure negative feed and you really see that within the first 15 to 20 minutes that you interact with the algorithm you will decide what is going to be distributed to your own feed in the next years on Tick Tock I had a presentation in November of 2020 where I had the opportunity to comment on gen Z Behavior what's happening on Tick Tock and what is going on the wrong direction I put on two videos that were kind of the worst and most sad content that I have been seeing on my personal for you feed just days ago I believe that at the end for them the takeaway was yeah this is on our platform okay cool but why should we do anything we have so much work to do there was no proactive engagement in that topic nobody even replied to my concerns Tick Tock is aware of content that is around suicide depression it disorder and mental health issues and they want to address that internally but only under the circumstance that you don't spend less time on the platform if this would be taken down foreign [Music] so I'm going to open the tick tock app on my phone and the first thing I see is before you feed this is an endless stream of content that I can scroll through and watch videos the interesting thing about the for you feed is every single Tick Tock user and now there's more than a billion around the world see a different thing on there for you feed it is hyper personalized to what the algorithm thinks you want to see and what it thinks will keep you on the app for as long as possible in the early days of social media one of the concerns about these products was this concept of filter Bubbles and this is where we have scenarios of teenagers and children being pulled into a virtual reality and being sent content about certain topics that they don't fully understand or grasp I want to understand what that feels like for a teenager to be sent never-ending content about a topic that has the ability to change their mindset to change the way they feel Chase Nazca was a young man living in New York two-parent households siblings did well in school incredible athlete you know he hugs and kisses his mom goodbye I'm going to the gym Mom rides his bike to the gym normal routine nothing out of the usual [Music] he works out he leaves the gym and as he's riding his bike home he stops at an unfenced area of some train tracks and he texts his friend and said I'm tired I can't do this anymore and he's gone his parents after the fact trying to piece things together and figure out what happened how did this happen are looking through his cell phone and they come across the tick tock for you page and what they see on the tick tock for you page is horrific through I mean over 100 of these videos he had bookmarked several thousand which is somewhat unusual a lot of kids don't do that but as a result it's created a scenario where we have a lot of what he was watching up until the day of his death so you really have his digital fingerprint right yeah what he was looking at what he was liking what he was favoring what he was searching too so we have and in fact let me pull this out and I can give you some examples in January you've got bench press tips kitchen hacks motivational speech gym motivation Batman that same day this is what Tick Tock chooses for him find what makes you happy I don't want to live sleeping is not enough I need to die so this is what tick tock's algorithm is sending to chase after he searches for a motivational speech correct this is a common one that he gets several times before he takes his life which is how he took his life I'm done oh wow um here's some violence kill her kill her now so a lot of what he starts getting are and it's possible if we went in we'd find he'd been through a breakup um and he starts getting images that are advocating like one is you're a terrible person which is why she's not with you um two is kill her killer I mean a teenager who's just gone through a breakup seeing this I mean I have no idea what kind of impact that's going to have on you all right shall we look at what is on his account today I downloaded tick tock on this device yesterday and then I put in the username and the passcode and it opened right into his account [Music] with anxiety and nerves and it starts immediately you're no good where are the silly dancing videos where are the kits and the dog dress up clips it's just so hard to wrap your head around the fact that what we were watching was specifically sent to a 16 year old boy who took his own life right this is this is the rabbit hole this is the wrapping wall this is Tick Tock I mean we've just watched a few minutes and it's been non-stop you should just die you're worthless you're nothing you're sad no one loves you you're unlovable these these companies collect tens of thousands of data points I mean you're telling me that that they know what car you drive what your education level is what you shop for on Sunday afternoon but they don't know that they're causing harm this is insane this is this is killing American children it was a really weird experience you know I've been reporting for months now trying to understand what is a filter bubble what does it feel like to be inside one and I just saw it it's hard to find the words to explain it because you can talk to families you can talk to lawyers you can talk to academics you can talk to researchers but to witness it and to watch what that 16 year old boy was seeing before he died what his account is still being sent now you know it really feels like you know these products are failing these kids [Music] I want to share with other people that this is what Tick Tock was sending me the easier thing would have been to not say anything but I don't think that's the right thing the right thing is to say something so that this doesn't happen to any other girls and they don't have to go through what I'm going through right now somebody needs to do it and just the feeling of empowerment it gives me I want to create the change that needs to be created [Music] there are a lot of issues on Tick Tock yes do I still like the app and the content yes it's just about the mechanism behind it if you have this content in your feed you're not alone really make sure that you spend more time in real life than to everybody who wants to work in Tech I think we need to get a little bit less brainwashed by what the company tells us and get back to how we personally experience social media what scares you the most any sort of possibility that we can't create change I don't know what kind of a world we live in where this continues now that people are finally starting to realize what these companies are doing that scares me the most it's the possibility that we cannot force these companies to make these products safer for kids they know the product's harmful they know it's hurting kids and they're still Distributing it to virtually every child that they can get into their hands [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]