TikTok Teachers Are Feeding An Addiction
Lets snort some TikTok
Some teachers, though well-intentioned, skilled, and genuinely invested in their students' success, are misjudging how to connect with them. To make learning “cool,” they push TikTok as an educational tool. But they’re wrong. Instead of enhancing education, they’re just feeding an addiction. Outsourcing the job they trained hard for to an algorithm. Why should kids pay attention to your lesson in class if you’ve already done a TikTok about it anyway?
Social media platforms are the modern-day equivalent of a classic street corner drug deal, only instead of heroin or cocaine, the product is likes, shares, and endless doom-scrolling. Their owners—tech-bros cloaked in Silicon Valley’s hoodies—are the pushers, expertly crafting their addictive concoctions with algorithms that know you better than your Irish mammy does, and these tech-bro dealers, like real-life dealers, have a nefarious ability for turning your teens’ limited attention spans into their financial gain. All the kids have to do is swipe left or right or hit those coveted like and share buttons.
TikTok teachers think it’s all about connectivity; it’s not, it’s about dependency. The moment YOUR PUPILS unlock their screens, they’re handed a sugar rush of notifications—bing, ping, ding—that stimulate the same pleasure centres as chocolate will or a shocking new video of the latest viral obsession. That same rush will keep them as hooked as the same rush you’re chasing, hoping your latest post will go viral, you and your students have a lot in common, desperately craving the inevitable dopamine hit that makes your brain do a little jig of satisfaction.
What do social media owners get in return for these Teacher-Pupil attention games? Revenue, of course. They harvest YOU AND YOUR PUPILS clicks and data—the precious raw material for their digital opium den. They repackage the so-called educational material you offer for free to your students, and then sell that same data to the highest bidder. In this scheme, users are the addicts and the product. It makes online advertising at best look morally questionable and at worst a criminal syndicate.
TikTok’s echo chamber fosters false comparisons, insecurity, and anxiety. Every child becomes a social media addict, measuring their worth in likes, shares, comments, and followers. When teachers cheerlead this addiction, they’re essentially endorsing a culture where the children they teach equate worth with the digital approval of whoever likes and shares their narcissism.
The teachers are chasing the same high they’re pedalling to their students. Every word you type online is fed into a slot machine of validation. The metrics never lie: you can measure your worth in real-time, heartbeat by heartbeat, as the likes and shares tick upward—or don’t. And when they don’t, it feels like silence. Like rejection. Constant rejection.
So you learn the game. You sand down your rough edges, you sharpen your hooks and looks, you serve up the version of yourself the TikTok machine rewards. It’s not even a choice, not really. The algorithm doesn’t force you to conform—it just makes loneliness the price of noncompliance.
We scream about censorship, about bans and shadowbans and deplatforming. But the real tyranny is subtler. It’s the way your thoughts begin to twist before they even reach your fingers, preemptively sculpted for approval. It’s the quiet erosion of you, not because someone took your voice away, but because you surrendered it, piece by piece, for the algorithmic dopamine hit of being seen. Free speech? Don’t make me laugh. The greatest threat to your voice isn’t some government censor in a back room. It’s the grinning, infinite hunger of the algorithmic feed, and the part of you that’s learned to love feeding it, like any other addiction. You only get shown what the algorithm wants you to see now.
A man drowned in Cork city recently, with onlookers filming and livestreaming the incident on TikTok and Facebook rather than helping. They rushed to post the incident on social media instead of throwing the drowning man a lifebuoy. Likes, views and shares, it would appear, are more important than attempting to save a life now. This is not some screed against teachers, after all, as parents, we are the primary enablers of our children’s social media behaviour; they don’t pick that stuff up off the floor. The Irish Government is now looking into banning social media for under-16s
Did you know the TikTok we see in our app store is banned in China, even though it’s ultimately controlled by the Chinese Government? Recently, TikTok was also fined €530 million by the Irish data protection officers for breaching data privacy rules in transferring European users’ data to China. There’s probably someone sitting behind a screen in China right now checking out your nude selfies in case you might be working for a government hostile to China.
TikTok is well aware of multiple widespread and serious harms it is causing, and that its engineers were often acting under the orders of company leadership to maximise engagement regardless of the harm to children. One leaked internal TikTok report put it:
“Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”
But hey, did you see my TikTok about The Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875? It got 1,984 views, even though there are only 12 kids in my class.
TikTok has a sister app called Douyin. It’s the Chinese version of TikTok, but being China, it’s heavily censored, so you only see what the government wants you to see, but there’s a key difference in how they treat children and teens compared to TikTok, even though they are both owned by the same company, Bytedance.
Douyin limits the use of the platform for children to 40 minutes a day. The rules apply to users under 14, who have been authenticated using their real names, and they are only able to access the app between 06:00 and 22:00. In 2023, Chinese regulators introduced a rule that would limit children under age 18 to two hours of smartphone screen time each day.
The Chinese recognise how damaging social media apps are. They’re heavily regulated in China so as not to rot the next generation's development. But they happily unleashed TikTok on the rest of the world. There’s that famous Bertrand Russell quote— “The Chinese nation is the most patient in the world; it thinks of centuries as other nations think of decades.”
Darkly amusing, the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) is partnering with TikTok to combat cyberbullying of teachers. Like going to your coke dealer to help get you clean.
These teachers aren’t just innocent bystanders—they’re enablers. Promoting TikTok is a risk. It’s a Pandora’s box of misinformation, risky dares, and bad influence disguised as “trendy.” If teachers aren’t careful, they’ll be handing kids the keys to a digital madhouse, where facts are flexible, and the motivation for doing anything is for “likes”. They’re essentially endorsing a culture where kids equate worth with digital approval. That’s emotional poison—kids who grow up thinking their value hinges on “likes” or a viral video are heading straight for a nervous breakdown.
The job for parents and teachers is to educate, not to create future TikTok stars or emotional wrecks. If you want kids to learn, teach them critical thinking—something far more valuable than a viral dance. Otherwise, you’re just creating a future society built on shallow, fleeting distractions. Social media isn’t just a tool for connecting people; it’s a high-stakes drug trade, led by the slick, smart-faced dealers of Silicon Valley who understand exactly how to keep their “customers” hooked on their multi-billion-dollar addiction scheme.
(I’m aware I’m posting this on multiple social media apps.) As the moralists will tell you, “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”