The Weirdly Refreshing Honesty of the Oscars of TikTok

Key Highlights

• X, too, was something of an issue.
• As a longtime tweeter, I kept doggedly logging into the app even after Elon Musk bought it, despite its proliferation of racist, pornographic, and conspiratorial posts.
• So strong was the hold that these platforms exerted on my time and habits that the only way for me to refrain from using them was to fully deactivate them, which I’d occasionally resort to doing.
• (If I simply deleted the apps from my phone, I would find myself—shamefacedly, self-loathingly—downloading them again almost immediately.) My brain, dependent on the instant gratification of likes and replies, reliant on the numbing comfort of scrolling and clicking, and terrified of the prospect of being alone with its own thoughts, was plenty full of poison without another social-media platform being added to the mix. My trepidation about TikTok, it seemed, had some grounding in reality.
• Certainly, in the past several years, the app has been blamed for any number of contemporary social ills.