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I Spent 15 Minutes on Tik Tok
Here is what I saw
Like most older people, I don’t spend much time looking at Tik Tok. As a matter of fact, I haven’t spent any time on Tik Tok. From what I have been able to gather, Tik Tok is a site for younger people, and yet I seem to hear about it all the time.
My students are always talking about videos they either saw or put on Tik Tok. I remember a group of young people on Tik Tok pranked Donald Trump by taking all the tickets to one of his rallies and then not showing up. The result was a sparsely-attended Trump rally.
You might say they pranked him bigly.
A number of years ago, when my son was in high school, young people were jumping off bridges into rivers shortly after the ice melted in the springtime. This was when I first heard of Tik Tok. It was called the “cold water challenge.” Some people were getting hurt in the jump, and I warned my son about the dangers of doing this. He assured me he was not going to be participating. I felt some sense of relief when he said that.
In recent years, we have heard about the Tide Pod Challenge where young people on Tik Tok were swallowing pods of laundry detergent. There was a 30-day gallon water challenge where participants drank a gallon of water every day for 30 days. There was also the “blackout challenge” where…
