Dear President Trump,
Please keep TikTok banned — for the sake of grown-up social-media addicts like me.
My coworker Jessica got me into TikTok. It’s where the 45-year-old gets all her news, information and products. She spends six hours a day on the app.
“I can’t live without it,” she told me in earnest.
So I tried it — and within a day was hooked. It was my new opioid. My forbidden pack of cigarettes.
And I wasn’t alone. Downplaying concerns over Chinese surveillance, you called it an app for “young kids watching crazy videos.” You’re wrong.
The number of TikTokers 35 and older has exploded over the past two years — they’re nearly half the app’s 1 billion users.
Gen Zers aged 18 to 24 were just a quarter of TikTok’s users in 2024, Exploding Topics says.
The biggest share were 25 to 34, at 30%. And 35- to 45-year-olds made up 19%, up from 16% in 2022, with those 45 to 55 at 13%, up from 8%.
Even the oldsters are getting in on the action: People over 55 made up 14% of TikTokers, a big jump from 9% two years earlier.
WE ARE ALL ON IT. And there’s a reason.
The AI-reliant algorithm is especially addictive — learning almost all there is to know about us within hours and spoon-feeding us content supercharged to tug at our emotions and keep us unable to look away, like a slow-moving car crash. For hours.
Then there’s the dopamine rush when your video goes viral (and for seconds, you too believe you can become a TikTok unicorn, earning millions off posting camera chitchats).
Nothing — literally nothing — was better than getting an alert that my report on Diddy’s “friends fleeing faster than rats on a sinking ship” garnered almost 500,000 views. Or seeing my Super Bowl humblebrags reach hundreds of thousands of views.
It felt good. I was validated — by nobody I knew, but who cared? As Sally Field once cried to the Academy, “You like me! Right now, you like me!”
But the time suck started to take its toll.
Creating videos took at least an hour or two. The interactions with “fans” took longer.
Even more distracting was chasing the dopamine dragon’s tail of likes — constantly checking how a new video did vs. an older one.
My attention span became next to zero. Forget reading an actual book — if a minute-long video didn’t get to the point in 10 seconds, I was out. NEXT!
Never mind I had to fit this obsessive activity and tinkering into and around my workday. Once I accidentally racked up four hours of TikTok videos before bed. It was exhausting.
Then it got weird.
My love of watching fat, cross-eyed cats rolling around and riding Roombas somehow let the algorithm think I’d be interested in grown-ass men dressed in crotchless kitty-cat leotards meowing rabidly at the screen.
Stupid human tricks turned into dumb Darwinian disasters as one viral hit was copied 9,000 times by others.
“Content creators” turned into desperate marketers — who were almost reading my mind.
Because the algorithm figured out I am perimenopausal, I was inundated with anti-aging and weight-loss tricks.
All sorts of videos started popping up to “help” — the crazy lady trying to sell me a vibrating “exercise” plate with a “grippy mat cover” that looked like it’d put me in traction in under five seconds, hundreds of women in their 20s and 30s telling me to try this AMAZING wrinkle-fighting skin cream (WTF do people under 45 know about wrinkles?) and, of course, supplements. One supplement, meant to make me think clearly, ironically helped me lose weight by working as a home colonic.
But it was more than the constant shill. Conspiracy theories with dark, weird undertones and antisemitic crap were thrown my way even before I dared post a benign “Bring them home” message (because what monster doesn’t want innocent people being held hostage to go home?).
In between, or even during, the marketing schemes for clothing, face creams and travel scams were emotionally charged videos begging people to stop Israel from “unwarranted bombings” on the innocents of Gaza who were justified in whatever may or may not have happened Oct. 7, 2023 (many people still think the free-for-all butchering was a fun, AI-generated trick).
If you want to find anyone on TikTok appalled by the Oct. 7 livestreaming of a modern-day pogrom, good luck!
It’s like Jerry Springer’s Bizarro cousin from an alternate QVC universe has taken over the Internet and wants to sell you everything, including a genuine Hamas scarf-and-hoodie combo, complete with a macrobiotic, vegan, vitamin-C-infused sunscreen that will protect you from not only the sun’s rays but Jewish eyes!
And of course pro-China messages popped up constantly, never mind the disaster of sending an “influencer journalist” (huh?) to a Shein factory to promote its wonders despite actual journalists finding Shein abuses its workers like slave labor. And while China couldn’t care less about Israel or Gaza, it does love promoting discord in the United States.
And a 2024 Rutgers University study, “The CCP’s Digital Charm Offensive,” found TikTok stacked its amazingly effective algorithm in the Chinese Communist Party’s favor.
I would rather use an American-controlled app that answers to the American government — not one answering to a government spying on American soil and seeking global domination by hook or by crook.
When the app went dark for a few hours Jan. 18, as the ban was about to take effect, and TikTokers who’d forgone a college education and actual work sobbed they’d no longer make a living, I thought, “Good. Go get a job. Stop promoting China.”
Mr. President, remember you yourself give credence to my views. Your blurb for my book “IT: 9 Secrets of the Rich and Famous That Will Take You to the Top” read: “Paula Froelich knows what she is talking about.”
So please: Keep the ban. Americans are better than this drivel.
Sincerely,
Paula Froelich, senior story editor at NewsNation