TikTok is “instrumental” in promoting deadly steroid-like drugs (SLD), a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate claims, and SLD companies attract 540 times more followers through TikTok influencers.
Boys and young men are SLD advertisements’ most susceptible and targeted demographic. Steroid companies pay TikTok influencers to assure young men that steroids are “risk-free,” often labeling the drugs “performance and image enhancing,” CCDH said in its report.
Last year, CCDH showed that girls as young as 13 were being bombarded with TikTok videos promoting self-harm, eating disorders and destructive norms about body image. But young women and girls aren’t the only group of young people who are being exposed to potentially damaging and dangerous content online.
A growing – and chronically understudied – crisis is being fomented among young boys and men, wrapped in toxic ideas of masculinity, strength, and misogyny, and amplified by unaccountable algorithms.
Several young men in the bodybuilding community have already lost their lives in incidents that have been linked to abuse of SLDs and extreme training methods. Each tragic death leaves behind a trail of devastated families and loved ones.7 It will continue to poison a generation of young boys who seek to reach a toxically unattainable physique, powered by potentially illegal substances marketed online.
TikTok is Chinese spyware that encourages eating disorders, criminal activity, and promiscuous behavior and promotes mental illness. There’s somehow always another TikTok evil to reveal, but the platform’s determination to persuade young men and women to hate their bodies is especially despicable. Mainly, because it’s so effective.
Steroids and weight-loss drugs like Ozempic are gaining popularity because social media promotes them with vigor. SLD websites gain millions of views, directly from TikTok, and TikTok users have viewed promotional steroid content 587 million times in the last three years. The platform is happy to exploit young men and women’s insecurities — all the more reason to delete the app for good.