A US teenager, 16-year-old Chase Nasca, spent the last few months of his life consuming TikTok content that promoted or normalized self harm and suicide. Then he committed suicide.
While many of the videos he watched did not violate TikTok’s content rules individually (although nearly 10 percent did), all together they created exactly the kind of repetitive pattern the company had recognized as unsafe in 2021 and designed a safeguard to interrupt. A safeguard that Nasca, like 15 million other TikTok users, was not given the benefit of. That decision was consciously made by TikTok as an experiment they ran for a year to test whether the safeguard reduced the number of daily active users in the protected group (who were 90 percent of users), a business concern that was evidently more important than what happened when other teenagers were repeatedly consuming those images of suicide.
As it turns out, suicide is what happens. Nasca died in February of 2022.
A subsequent review of Nasca’s account found it had become trapped in a bubble filled with videos about suicide, self-harm, depression, loneliness, and hopelessness. During the final two weeks of his life, 73 percent of the 7,563 videos served to Nasca had themes of mental health struggles, suicide awareness, loneliness, relationships, or sadness.
Nasca’s parents filed a lawsuit against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, claiming Chase had no history of mental illness and primarily used the app to look up motivational workouts and pop culture. However, the lawsuit alleged that TikTok’s algorithm overrode his search history and actively targeted him by flooding his “For You” page with more than 1,000 unsolicited, highly graphic videos glorifying suicide and self-harm.
TikTok’s legal team successfully argued that the case should be dropped based on Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which immunizes online platforms from liability regarding content created by third-party users. Nonetheless, a number of suits involving addiction have been settled by TikTok right before trial and the Ninth Circuit has allowed several such suits to proceed despite the Section 230 defense.
The conclusion that emotional intelligence researchers easily reached? While it’s well established that other humans can spread a mood through emotional contagion, social media itself is expert in manipulating mood.
A secret, psychological experiment that Facebook conducted in 2011 was the harbinger of the TikTok fiasco. Facebook manipulated the News Feed algorithms of almost 700 thousand randomly selected users to test “emotional contagion”—whether online exposure to positive or negative emotional content could alter the real-world moods and posting behavior of users. The study concluded that those who were exposed to more positive content had more positive postings and similarly those exposed to more negative content made more negative postings. Although the secret aspect of the experiment became arguably more notorious than the study results, no real steps were taken to reduce the likelihood of intentional manipulation of emotions via social media.
Both of these experiments’ findings are fully in line with the more personal version of negative content repeatedly spewed by misbehaving algorithms–rumination. Universally acknowledged as not useful in any way, rumination is particularly common in lawyers who are prone to go over again and again what they perceive to be mistakes. What exactly went wrong? What else went wrong? How injurious were they to the lawyer’s reputation, career? What else could have been done? What would the better outcome be? Lashing oneself with guilt and self-deprecation for extended periods of time., rumination is a recipe for feeling and acting worse, not better. A self-delivered penance for what is likely a self-assessed and highly-inflated failure does not improve the next round of decisions. It actually lowers one’s confidence and infects future action with fear.
Social media can manipulate your mood. So can you.