Social media victory?

In September 2016, a Chinese Internet Company known as ByteDance launched an app known as A.me.

Three months later it was re-branded as Douyin, a Chinese word which means “shaking sound”.

This app which is focused on music videos is considered a super app because of the multiple exciting opportunities to combine short videos and to also livestream. With built-in editing tools, users can add text, subtitles, graphics and animations to these videos.

Within a year of its introduction, 100 million users signed up with more than one billion videos viewed each day.

With such encouraging patronage, the owners of the app decided it was time to launch a global version which they named TikTok.

Globally, this caught up with many people of all walks of life resulting in the app being adjudged among others, the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store in 2018 and 2019 ‒ a feat that not even Facebook, YouTube or Instagram could match up with.

TikTok
Most children use this app especially because of the short lip-sync videos they can make and share with others. Through TikTok, many have seen their businesses resurrecting and blossoming beyond mere entertainment.

In spite of its very innovative and potentially beneficial nature, much scrutiny of this app revealed certain disturbing issues necessitating a ban on its activities in the United States of America this year.

First, it was deemed a national security threat because this app harvests the personal information of its users.

This is a breach in data protection, particularly because of America’s relationship with China.

We are all bombarded every day with all sorts of information containing recommended content that we like.

This is possible because many social media apps use algorithms that track our preferences and do everything to suck us in by reinforcing our desires.

This is how the problem of addiction and its negative impact on mental health is fuelled.

China
Interestingly, what most people are not aware of is that the domestic Chinese version known as Douyin actually enforces strict protections for young users in China.

For the rest of the children of the world, this is not so. Our children are on their own because restrictions are not stringent enough on TikTok, leaving them exposed to dangerous, inappropriate and offensive content.

The Chinese version of TikTok also has carefully curated educational content.

Chinese youth using Douyin are exposed to science experiments, general age-appropriate educational content, mouth-watering science, technology, engineering, art and math tutorials and videos celebrating academic achievement and innovation among children.

The app is designed to add value to the young ones as a strategy to harness potential for the development of their society.

Restrictions
The local Chinese app also allows mandatory breaks and restrictions that feature a “teenage mode”.

This is a screen time protection effort to limit the use of the app by children under 14 to 40 minutes a day.

Between the hours of 10pm and 6am this app is unavailable to these young ones.

This begs the question of the motive behind this deliberate disparity and protection efforts by the owners while leaving the rest of the children of the world to face the dangers of Internet exposure, collecting their personal data and bombarding them with content they like to get them hooked on for hours.

While parents consider how to ensure the safety of their children on the Internet, it is important that policymakers also focus on how to leverage technology to boost the productivity of our youth for future gains.

In the meantime, this social media victory raises critical questions of how our policymakers can also act to sanitise our social media space to ensure the safety of the Ghanaian child.

The writer is a Child Development Expert/ Fellow at Zero-to-three Academy, USA.
E-mail: nanaesi_19@yahoo.co.uk