WTF: What’s this trend of parents scaring their kids on TikTok?

There are a few that aren’t actually the sharpest knife in the drawer. On TikTok, the online video platform, parents enjoy filming their babyalone in front of the camera, with the image of a creepy floating ghost behind them. Children are frightenedand so are the parents laughing. What are we having fun! (No).

Terrifying children on TikTok, this cruelty

These videos are numerous. In some of them, children find themselves in front of their parents’ phones. The latter leave the room, while they record the reaction of their boys, left alone, in front of the appearance of a rude ghost that begins to float in the background, prompting a pseudo-demonic laugh.

Some children cry, others run away or scream and knock on the door to call, laughing, the parents who pick them up, after having recorded everything.

In Northern Ireland, politician Jason Barr decided to ask TikTok for an explanation after receiving complaints from several families, appalled by the rapid spread of this new trend.

The spokesperson for the platform responded via the local newspaper The Belfast Live:

The safety and well-being of our community is our top priority, which is why we ban and remove content that promotes child abuse and bullying. “

However, from this August 18 statement, many videos of scared and traumatized children keep spinning, under the hashtag #filtrofantasma.

in addition to psychological damage that the vision of this type of filter can provoke, it is particularly cruel on the part of these parents to find some fun in frightening their children, to entertain their members (or acquire new ones).

If someone can already discover that exposing children, in general, on social networks, is not correct towards them (one wonders where their consent has gone), it is all the more so. doubtful, cruel and violent to expose them by experiencing an event that is a bit scary at best, even traumatic at worst, and to mock their reaction.

We recall in passing that the Observatory on ordinary educational violence classifies the humiliating prank as violence. Catherine Verdier, child psychologist and contacted by The HuffPost explains the consequences of using these filters on children:

They can be completely traumatized. We can find post-traumatic stress with difficulty sleeping, eating, nightmares … The child can drag him out for a long time. (…)

With social media, we allow ourselves things that we would not allow ourselves if they weren’t there. We can stage children, but not to make fun of them. All this to get views and likes.

Photo credit image by a: Screenshot of the breezyboy_marcus video on TikTok