TikTok risks pushing kids towards harmful mental health content
Tiktok 's business model is 'inherently abusive' and 'poses a danger' to children, according to researchers. An investigation by Amnesty International, Algorithmic Transparency Institute and AI Forensics, concluded that children and young people watching mental health-related content on TikTok's personalised ‘For You’ page were drawn into 'rabbit holes' of potentially harmful content, including videos that romanticise and encourage depressive thinking, self-harm and suicide. Using automated accounts set up to represent users in the USA and Kenya, the researchers discovered that after 5-6 hours on the TikTok platform, almost 1 in 2 videos shown were mental health-related and potentially harmful, roughly 10 times the volume served to accounts with no interest in mental health. Furthermore, when researchers manually rewatched mental health-related videos, over half the videos were related to mental health struggles, including videos encouraging suicide. System 🤖 TikTok For You Operator: Developer: Bytedance/Tiktok Country: Kenya; Philippines; USA Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts Purpose: Recommend content Technology: Recommendation algorithm Issue: Safety Investigations, assessments, audits 👁️ Amnesty (2023). Driven into the Darkness Amnesty (2023). I Feel Exposed Amnesty (2023). Driven into the Darkness. How TikTok encourages self-harm and suicidal ideation
- Date it happened
- 2023-11-01
- Product, system or model
- For you
This incident was imported from AIAAIC and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.