Reasons for Teenagers’ Habitual Use of Social Media: A Case Study of TikTok

Oldenburg Academy, Oldenburg, IN, 47006, the United States

^* Corresponding author: yihanhanyang@gmail.com

Abstract

With the development of Internet and 5G, new social media has been constantly developing and updating. People are getting more and more used to get information from social media. People’s lives have been filled with applications, such as TikTok and Instagram. These applications not only bring much fun and convenience to people, but also make it possible for people’s fragmented time to be used wisely. However, at the same time, many people, especially teenagers with poor self-control, would easily be overdependent on the social media. As one of the most famous social media at present, with the help of big data, TikTok has successfully made some teenagers seriously depend on its platform by inferring the users’ minds and accurately showing them the content they demand. This paper takes TikTok as a case study and teenagers as the research object to analysis the reasons why teenagers use social media habitually, and provide some reasonable solutions to reduce teenagers’ media dependency. In short, teenagers get addicted to TikTok primarily because of their self-control is not strong enough so that they fell into the trap of TikTok. TikTok and other social media use big data to predict users’ preference, and take advantage of users’ psychology to make teenagers get addicted to social media without realizing. In order to get rid of the traps, network supervision departments should strengthen the management, TikTok and other social media should recommend more useful short videos to teenagers, and teenagers themselves can also take advantage of big data.