In the darkness of my room, I found myself stuck in bed frozen with my face illuminated by the light of the screen on my phone. I scrolled on TikTok, watching endless amounts of videos, from short ones about book recommendations, to longer ones about new fashion trends. Before I knew it, I had been on my phone for four hours.

Since downloading TikTok in 2019, I have noticed an increase of people outrightly insulting others in the comment sections. Even though I have viewed TikTok as an application to use to wind down and relax, I have started to think about how it’s affecting not just me, but our society as a whole. I am increasingly thinking that this arguably aggressive behavior is affecting our connections with others and that these behaviors on TikTok might start to spill out onto our daily lives and negatively affect us. To properly define it, TikTok is a social media app that allows users to create, edit, and share videos usually between fifteen seconds and three minutes. Users are able to post a variety of videos from dances and tutorials, to opinions about different topics. TikTok is known for its personalized feeds, and many – like me – spend copious amounts of time scrolling through them.

In their respective works, philosopher James Williams and theorist Sigmund Freud help to explain the negative effects of TikTok. In Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, Williams writes about how information technology threatens human freedom by capturing and exploiting our attention. He believes that technology is undermining the integrity of the human will and distracting us from our goals. Likewise in Civilization and its Discontents,Freud discussed the tensions between civilization and the individual. What distinguishes the two works is that Freud was mostly worried about individuals as they related to society, while Williams, on the other hand, is today more concerned about how individuals have allowed themselves to have too much liberty.

In relation to TikTok, to some degree I have to speculate about what Williams and Freud might note because Freud wrote during a time in which technology as we know it did not exist. His ideas relating to human interactions did not expand to consider a world in which interactions took place on screens. Additionally, even though Williams is writing in the twenty-first century, he focuses on interactions on applications such as Facebook that generally have an older audience. These older audiences have developed different social skills, and their ability to be respectful is more developed than the users of TikTok, who are typically young adults. Nevertheless, Freud and Williams’ perspectives offer a better understanding of the challenges created by platforms like TikTok, revealing how they influence both our in-person interactions as well as the minds of individuals. Using both Williams and Freud, in this essay, I will discuss how interactions on TikTok reveal the impact of social media platforms on behavior in life. I will use their ideas to explain two specific examples of these negative interactions on TikTok and how harmful these interactions can be.

Turning to the first example, Cecily Bauchmann, a popular TikTok influencer known for making content about her life as a pastor’s wife and stay-at-home mom of four, has faced intense criticism from her followers. Recently, she has been being judged for her approach to her oldest daughter’s birthday party. During their family celebration, Cecily allowed her other three children to blow out candles on the cake for her eldest daughter as well, leading to a mass of angry comments. Many commenters called her a “horrible mom,” writing that she was ruining her daughter’s childhood and accused her of failing as a parent. The backlash continued across multiple videos. Additionally, users started digging up private parts of her life and arguing about how her job as a content creator resulted in the unemployment of her husband as a pastor.

Freud, for his part, would describe the reactions that ensued from the Bauchmann controversy as an example of the human id overpowering its ego and superego. According to Freud, the id is the most basic part of our mind. It is the source of our drives of pleasure and aggression. The id is the most selfish part of the mind, one that is most concerned with immediate satisfaction of whatever the body needs. The ego is the second part of the subconscious that contains reason and common sense. It contains the so-called “reality principle” that allows the ego to see reality. The reality principle helps the ego balance what the id craves with what is actually realistic and socially acceptable. Finally, the superego is the moral part of us, the one that internalizes cultural rules mainly taught by the guiding influence of parents. It is the part of us that punishes misbehavior with guilt. It is the part of us that controls our sense of right and wrong.  In the case of Bauchmann, the id seems to be overpowering the superego.

More specifically still, pleasure and aggression principles both help make up the id. Freud defines the pleasure principle as, “the driving force of the id that seeks immediate gratification of all needs, wants, and urges” (“Freud’s Theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego”), and the aggression principle is “the aggressive impulse is innate and derived from the death instinct” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). Typically, during in-person interactions we repress our principles of aggression and pleasure to come together, to socialize. We would never think to insult people to their faces and tell them they are horrible moms just because they did something wrong or in a thoughtless manner, especially over something trivial like a birthday party. In in-person interactions, even if we do believe a person to be wrong, we would rarely attack a person with this much ferocity for fear of disrupting the norms of society.

However, on TikTok the way society works is different. There are no properly predefined rules. On TikTok people do not exercise their superego because they are not expressing themselves in a room. This freedom allows the id to run wild and stops the suppression of their aggression and pleasure principles. Freud writes: “The tension between the harsh superego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt…Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it” (Freud 124). However, as we have seen, people on the TikTok are functioning together without having to form and follow the rules of civilization. As a result they have no superego guiding their decisions, therefore feeling no guilt that comes from abnormal behavior.

Williams also theorizes about the way we interact online. He created a theory about human goals as they relate to the use of “Spotlight,” “Starlight,” and “Daylight” attention. The first level is “Spotlight” which is our current task at hand. The second level is “Starlight,” our ability to navigate “by the stars” of our higher values or goals as humans. “Daylight” is the third, and most profound level of attention (Williams, 49). To me, Williams’ notion of “Daylight” almost functions like Freuds’ superego. It allows us to define our goals and values and “want what we want.” Williams would argue that users’ aggressive reaction to the Bauchmann situation goes against the concept of us not practicing our “Starlight” attention, as well as not having a properly defined version of our Daylight attention. We are not using our “Starlight” attention because on TikTok it seems that users are not controlling their behaviors and people choose to say whatever they want. This also comes from the fact that their “Daylight” seems to be similarly unclear.

In addition to the Bauchmann drama, turning to the second example, a situation involving TikTokers Rhegan777 and Marina Saavedra caught my eye. Rhegan777, with 4.6 million followers, is a popular figure on TikTok. Marina Saavedra, a lesser-known influencer, posted a video about attending Rhegan’s birthday party as a plus one. She criticized the event, calling it a “flop”. Despite backlash from users who felt her comments were harsh, especially for a personal birthday party rather than for a public influencer event, Saavedra continued to post clips from the party to highlight how “uncool” it was. Instead of constructive criticism, many resorted to bullying Saavedra with insults and derogatory comments. What started as a good lesson about respecting one another quickly devolved into a situation in which people just started to cyberbully Saavedra.

This reaction to the videos of Saavedra immediately reminded me of Williams’ idea of moral outrage. Williams describes moral outrage as, “more than just anger: it also includes the impulse to judge, punish, and shame someone you think has crossed a moral line… Moral outrage played a useful role earlier in human evolution, when people lived in small nomadic groups: it enabled greater accountability, cooperation, and in-group trust” (Williams 71). The use of social media has given us more access to more moral outrage. People are able to see the wrongs others have done with just a quick search on applications like TikTok. While Williams explained moral outrage as previously “useful” in previous stages of human evolution, in this modern and possibly more advanced world, moral outrage no longer really has a place in our society.

Overall, a combination of Freuds’ theories about the id and the superego, as well as Williams’ ideas of moral outrage and different stages of attention explains how TikTok’s culture ruins personal values and influences social interaction. The stakes could not be higher. As Williams puts it: “when our daylight is compromised, epistemic distraction results. Epistemic distraction is the diminishment of underlying capacities that enable a person to define or pursue their goals” (Williams 68).

As we have seen, users are increasingly unable to define what they want, what their personal morals are. I hope this essay brings attention to how harmful the way people are capable of speaking on TikTok can be, and how detrimental the speech being used on TikTok can be as it is going against the learned rules of social respectability we were taught about as kids. Finally, I am hoping this essay emphasizes the need for greater awareness on how platforms like TikTok can negatively shape our social dynamics, especially as these new generations grow up in a world that relies on applications such as TikTok.

Works Cited

“APA Dictionary of Psychology.” American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association,19Apr.2018,dictionary.apa.org/aggression#:~:text=In%20the%20classical%20psychoanalytic%20theory,see%20frustration%E2%80%93aggression%20hypothesis).

Kendra Cherry, MSEd. “Why Freud’s Pleasure Principle Motivates Behaviors.” Verywell Mind, Verywell Mind, 6 Sep. 2023, www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-pleasure-principle-2795472.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.

“Freud’s Theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego by CommonLit Staff.” Edited by Common Lit Staff, CommonLit, 2015, www.commonlit.org/en/texts/freud-s-theory-of-the-id-ego-and-superego.

Williams, James. Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2018.