You might find a title such as “The Devil’s War on Tiktok’s Hypocrisy” a bit frivolous. And you’d be correct in doing so. And this title comes across as an attempt at levity because you know TikTok, and most of social media, for that matter, is more sinister than anything the Devil has ever done.
As I tend to do, I will only post questions that will hopefully make you think about ideas you accept. One of my primary jobs as the Devil is to make you challenge your commitment to beliefs.
Start of the war
On August 3rd of, 2021, I wrote a rant disguised as an opinion on the problem with cultural relativism and how the TikTok platform gave intolerant ideas a forum.
My complaint in that post was the concerning amount of viral videos of children being physically abused by their parents. Some of these videos implied that a child woke up from a thrashing they ostensibly deserved because of their behaviour.
You can read the post here: The Devil’s Opinion: The Problem With Cultural Relativism, Violent TikTok Videos.
On other videos you can hear young human screaming – crying from the pain of a beating by their parents, which, again, they deserved for misbehaving.
The justification for this abuse was the family’s ethnicity.
In the post, I said the following.
As an example, I’ll share the anecdote of a conversation with an acquaintance who, in his desperate attempt to demonstrate his liberalism, erred on the side of cultural relativism. I have to submit here that his motives were noble, but his methods directly conflicted with the very principles he tried to defend.
As a point of conversation, I brought up a social media trend in which families of different ethnicities show themselves beating their children (and aggressively to the point of hearing the children cry in agony) for misbehaving. You know the videos I refer to; some have millions of views and as many likes. He argued that no one had the right to tell the people in the videos that what they were doing was wrong – and only because their videos invoke a cultural reason for their actions.
It’s upsetting for me to report that those videos are still running and collecting positive feedback on TikTok. I will not link to them here to avoid benefiting their analytics.
Get new content delivered to your inbox.
Questions
A worrying question is why the social media network allows these evidently barbaric videos to continue playing? And the answer is simple. These videos are excellent traffic sources to the platform, which often translates to advertisement dollars.
It is difficult to find public objections to this content, especially from TikTok. People are too wrapped up in the idea of political correctness to oppose even child abuse when cultural sensitivity supports it.
Do you know what TikTok is quite adamant about opposing? Nudity. Because, and I know you can sense my sarcasm here, a sexy body is more harmful than children’s suffering.
TikTok has vowed to start removing footage of nudity or sexual content. I can guarantee they won’t do it, that content is also a considerable source of revenue. But their superficial resistance to it reflects another problem.
Just like the vile stupidity of cultural justification for child beatings, nudity and sex are powerful motivators of human behaviour. Humans are primarily irrational imbeciles who will do anything to satisfy their emotional dispositions.
HYPOCRISY
Now, let me make something clear. I don’t have a problem with nudity or sexual content within the framework of consent. I don’t care that social media encourages its propagation by prioritising it on their platforms. And they do. But I am disgusted by the hypocrisy of their claims to care about “good content” and community guidelines.
After all, all social media platforms are private companies, and they can set their own guidelines with adequate consequences.
However, the perception management and the disinformation campaigns they employ to benefit their bottom lines are unethical.
I’ll reiterate that nudity is perfectly acceptable in the proper context. Violence isn’t. And violence against children is deplorable.
I’ll end this piece like I did my other TikTok article.
If you disagree with me here – if my objections hurt your cultural feelings – you have a bigger problem. My human form hails from a culture rife with the same child abuse those videos glorify, and if it spares one child from suffering and pain, I am willing to sacrifice any cultural norm.
Thank you for reading.
— The Devil Unbound
