TikTok and the brief decade of our mind-numbing

While observers continue to debate whether the chicken or the egg came first, and whether the monstrous world we seem to be living in — schoolchildren stabbing their teachers, Nazis, murderous AI — is all down to social media, or merely a perception shaped by social media, it has been noted that two days ago — which also happened to be my birthday — marked TikTok’s anniversary. Ten years since 20 September 2016, when it was launched in China. Ten years which, as they say, have changed the world.

We are also somewhat taken aback by our Prime Minister, who over the weekend appeared to take more selfies than anyone else—first with the crowds in the Brescia valleys to mark Beretta’s 500th anniversary, and then with the young people from Fenix at the EUR lake, amid fans and jokes about carbonara, posing for photos on other people’s phones, courtesy of Ed Sheeran. In short, we’re all caught up in this whole thing as if it were normal, and yet until quite recently, it wasn’t.

Created by the Chinese company ByteDance and having grown globally thanks to the acquisition of Musical.ly, TikTok had a brilliant insight – a sort of ‘Steve Jobs-ism’ meets ‘Berlusconism’: do not ask the user what they want to see anymore; show it to them yourself – they are gullible enough to accept anything. Then the platform observes how much of that content resonates and serves the next video. Likes and comments do matter, but what counts most is the time spent watching the video and the decision to watch it all the way to the end. That is why, if users happen to view a video of a turtle, they can expect to see nothing but turtles for months to come (‘don’t clutter up my feed’ – i.e. don’t send me turtles – is one of the most frequent warnings boomers now receive).

Instagram and YouTube have copied the formula, and that brings us to the present day. It seems as though the endless scroll has always been with us. Yet ‘doomscrolling’ – the practice whereby, like sheep, we stare at our smartphones for hours on end in the bluish glow of our bedrooms – is only ten years old. What did we do before? Have sex? Read In Search of Lost Time thirty-six times? No one can say.

Here, the ‘social media of dance’, as it was initially called, really took off with Salvini in autumn 2019 – the first, and for three years the only, ‘king of cringe’ according to Vice. In the summer and autumn of 2022, during the election campaign, Berlusconi made his mobile phone debut, announcing on Porta a Porta that his first video “had broken all world records”: eight and a half million views (Pagella Politica debunks this: Khaby Lame routinely gets a hundred million views, and there are videos with over a billion views). The Cavaliere would have preferred the name “Tik Tok Tak”, but that did not come to pass.

Ever since then, everyone has been trying to take TikTok away from children. In a sort of global cleansing ritual, Australia banned social media for under-16s on 10 December. On 21 July, France voted to ban the app for under-15s, but on 14 August the Constitutional Council struck down the measure as disproportionate; only the ban on mobile phones in secondary schools survived. Denmark has announced a ban for 15-year-olds, citing the worst-ever PISA scores (those that attest to the general dumbing down of the youngsters); Spain is considering it, Germany is considering it, Norway is considering it. Then, last Thursday, the European Commission presented the Kids Act, which stands for ‘Keeping Internet Digital Spaces Accountable and Trustworthy’: no social media for under-thirteens, a ‘mini-account’ managed by parents with one hour’s use per day up to the age of fourteen, and a full account from the age of fifteen; no more endless scrolling, no more night-time notifications.

In China, however, where the weapon was invented—ostensibly to exterminate the West by turning it into a bunch of idiots—children have been subject to a forty-minute limit for quite some time now. In Italy, there are three proposals: some say at fifteen, others at thirteen, and others until the age of majority, but they’re all stalled in parliament, held up by the issue of how to verify age without keeping records: ‘You could log in using SPID,’ he says. However, if a minor were to successfully log in using SPID, that same credential could in theory also grant them the right to vote, drive a car, or even stand for Prime Minister.

It remains uncertain how these TikTok-deprived children will fare; some commentators suggest they might resemble my generation of left-wing children whose parents rationed their TV time—in other words, with significant psychological complexes. Even the Silicon Valley crowd, who copied TikTok and made it their own, ban it for their children. Peter Thiel told the New York Times that his children, aged three and five, spend an hour and a half a week in front of a screen. Sam Altman constantly consults ChatGPT for parenting advice, but he’s uncompromising when it comes to tablets and algorithmic feeds: he wants his son to ‘play with mud’. Some children attend schools where such devices are banned, such as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos, just a few minutes from Google: for children aged three to twelve, smartphones are forbidden, with fees running up to forty-seven thousand dollars a year. Steiner-inspired. And back to the telly, just like the young Berlusconis in those days (and Dell’Utri: whilst their fathers were inventing commercial television, their children were busy playing with wax crayons).

Then there is the opposite case, which would, however, prove the former right. Mark Zuckerberg claims that his eight-year-old daughter is already programming and producing videos using AI, and this raises the suspicion that it is a statement drafted by his lawyers, given that Meta has just settled a claim for nearly eighteen billion specifically for harm caused to minors. Little Zuckerberg might well have a fake TikTok account featuring Rodari’s fairy tales read by the Rohrwacher sisters. After all, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, ran a private school from their home for four years in a neighbourhood in Palo Alto: I’d been there, years ago. There they set up the ‘Bicken Ben School’, with fourteen pupils from nursery to Year 4, three teachers and no licence. The neighbours, who had been protesting since 2016, won their case, and the local council shut it down last year; a spokesperson explained that it was ‘a home-schooling initiative set up during the pandemic’. They were evicted just like any other family living in the woods.

The only entity that truly succeeded in shutting it down was TikTok itself: on 18 January 2025, at half past ten in the evening, it shut itself down in America, and the following day at midday it came back online, thanking President Trump. The same Trump who had banned it in 2020 and who, in 2024, wrote instead that anyone who wanted to save it had to vote for him: five executive orders later, the American arm of TikTok was handed over to a consortium led by Oracle’s Trump-supporting Larry Ellison (aged 82). Once again, it seems that children are not the problem. TikTok’s children and grandchildren are already adults, and there is little that can be done about it. If anything, the damage is more serious among the elderly. Those who furiously scroll on their phones tucked away in their little leather wallets, with the ringtone blaring at a hundred decibels – the ones we all find ourselves sitting next to on trains, on public transport, in waiting rooms, and who, before long, will be us. The over-80s—the only age group without parental controls, and without SPID either (who knows how they manage in China, but never mind).