Beware the Dangers of TikTok

LGBT extremists are deliberately targeting children with dangerous propaganda using methods that are designed to ensure that the children’s parents know nothing about it. That is the disturbing lesson from two stories that broke over the past few weeks.

The first story involves a uproar that broke out at a school in California. Parents there are up in arms after it was revealed that two teachers at the school have been digitally “stalking” their students to find malleable recruits for their LGBT club.

In recorded comments, the teachers boasted about how they used technology designed to monitor their students during Covid-related online learning to see which students were visiting LGBT-themed websites, or speaking with their peers about LGBT topics. They would then personally reach out to those students, and invite them to join the “Equality Club.”

In one case, the teachers coached a twelve-year-old girl how to go about developing a “transgender” identity, while making sure that her parents were kept in the dark. The girl’s mother only learned that her daughter was now “transgender” when she was called into a meeting at the school.

In a fiery speech at a school board meeting, the furious mother recounted how school officials got angry with her when she continued to call her daughter “she” at the meeting, and accused her of not being “emotionally supportive” of her child.

A few days later, Child Protective Services (CPS) showed up at her door, saying that a complaint had been made against her. CPS officials questioned the woman’s children, asking them if they wanted to be removed from the house. “They made me feel like a monster,” she said. Although CPS dropped the case, the mother said she has been terrified to ask questions about what’s happening at school for fear that her children might get taken away.

The good news in this case is that parents at that school have banded together and are pushing back. At the moment, both teachers have been suspended, pending an investigation.

 

TikTok is Awash with Transgender Propaganda

However, other tactics being used by LGBT extremists to access children and to mold their minds, all without their parents knowing, are less easy to detect, and far more difficult to fight.

That’s the lesson of the second important story. A few weeks ago, the Daily Mail published the results of a study showing that pro-transgender activists are using the wildly popular social media platform TikTok to push transgender-themed videos, many of which are instructional videos about how to go about becoming transgender, including obtaining sex-change hormones and surgery.

teenage girl on her phone in a coffee shop

According to the Daily Mail, videos tagged with the hashtag #Trans, have been viewed over 26 billion times on the site.

It is hard to overstate the popularity of TikTok, particularly among children and teenagers. Recently, TikTok surpassed Google as the #1 most-visited website on the Internet. Many teens spend hours on TikTok every day.

Savvy LGBT-activists have openly and explicitly partnered with the social media platform to push as much LGBT-themed content as possible. Last, year TikTok signed a partnership agreement with the extreme LGBT-activist organization Stonewall to do just that.

As the Daily Mail reports, one popular “transgender” influencer, Bella Fitzpatrick, who is only 19-years-old, has over 700,000 followers on the site. Recently, he (who now claims to be a “she”) raised £20,000 to fund his sex-change surgery, documenting the process along the way, and providing detailed information about how others can follow his example.

Trans activists are not shy about their plan to reach kids using the platform. One such activist, a makeup artist and drag queen who goes by the name Mother Victory, boasted to the Today Show about how he amassed 1.5 million followers during the pandemic.

The Today Show highlighted one 16-year-old, Jaye Kim, whose biological sex is unclear from the story but who identifies as “non-binary,” who credited Mother Victory for giving him/her the courage to adopt a new identity. “I’m Asian and I am nonbinary, so I never see people like me on TV or in movies or anything,” said Kim. “Mother Victory is so funny and bold and just not afraid to put herself out there. Seeing her videos made me have more self-confidence, and looking at how many followers she has makes me feel I can be myself and be accepted, too.”

 

TikTok Fueling a Social Contagion

The Daily Mail quoted concerned parents who are fearful that TikTok is “fueling a social contagion,” by presenting transgenderism as the “cool” thing to do to millions of impressionable teens.

Kate Harris, who belongs to LGB Alliance, which opposes extreme transgender ideology, noted that many of the videos on TikTok suggest “that it is easy to change sex and that it is the answer to all of your problems.” She called the videos “deeply frightening,” noting that “the message is so often, ‘Don’t involve your parents.’”

Fear of a social-media-fed social contagion is not just baseless alarmism. There is growing evidence in support of the existence of what researchers have called “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” In cases of rapid onset gender dysphoria, children and teenagers with no prior history of gender confusion suddenly self-identify as transgender. Frequently, this coincides with other individuals in their social circle or school also identifying as transgender.

In one extreme case, a total of 17 students at a single UK school suddenly identified as transgender. Many of those students, incidentally, had autism. Girls, in particular, seem to be especially susceptible to rapid onset gender dysphoria.

The idea of social contagion would in part explain the dizzying explosion in the numbers of children and teens identifying as transgender in recent years. For instance, one survey by the CDC in 2019 found that nearly two percent of students in grades 9-12 identify as “transgender.” Meanwhile, according to The Telegraph, in 2009-10 in the UK, there were just 40 girls seeking transgender “treatments” in the UK. By 2017-18, that grew to 1,806, an increase of 4,400%.

As the Mail notes, many of the videos on TikTok present transgenderism not only as harmless and easy, but also as something that can bring all sorts of benefits. One TikTok influencer, Alex Consani, 18, says in a video that followers may be only “one oestrogen pill away from a glow up.” As the Mail explains, “A ‘glow up’ is a mental, physical and emotional transformation for the better.”

Take millions of kids going through the already-confusing period of adolescence and sexual development, isolate them during a pandemic, give them 24/7 access to the Internet, and then flood their minds with radical content suggesting that all their angst and other problems may be due to being born in the “wrong body,” and propose adopting a transgender identity as the “solution,” and it is inevitable that some will decide to give transgenderism a try.

question marks

Some of these, alas, will be permanently and profoundly harmed by the experiment, ending up in a dark world of sexual confusion, with bodies permanently mutilated and sterilized by irreversible drug regimens and surgeries.

 

Don’t Give Your Children Smartphones. Period.

All I can say by way of conclusion is to reiterate something that I have said many times in the past: Parents, don’t give your children smartphones. Period.

Just don’t do it.

The brother of someone I know said that when he sent his children to a local public school, his children were the only children in the entire school who did not have a smartphone.

Of course, some of the parents of children with smartphones probably had filtering on their children’s phones. But frankly, that’s not good enough. Although filtering is better than no filtering, all filtering technology is imperfect. Furthermore, while filtering technology can filter explicit materials, the kind of propaganda being posted on TikTok is designed to get around filtering by purporting to be “educational material” about “human rights” and “health.”

Filtering technology is a poor replacement for good parenting and oversight. If, for whatever reason (and, as mentioned, I can’t think of a good one), a parent feels that they must give their children a smartphone, that does not excuse them from frequently checking what their children are viewing, and frequently talking with their children about the responsible use of technology. The same goes for all computers and televisions in the house.

Concerned parents would not invite the local drag queen into their home for unsupervised conversations with their children. So why would they give their children a device that allows them to potentially spend endless hours listening to that same drag queen (or worse) tell their child, in graphic detail, precisely how they can socially, medically, and surgically alter themselves to become the opposite sex, and how they can go about hiding all of this from their own parents?

Yes, that is what these people are doing. And they are doing it with the enthusiastic support of the big-tech companies, like TikTok, that have captured the rapt attention of tens of millions of our children. As a parent, your job is to say, “No! Not in my house. Not with my children.”

Any technology, application, program, or virtual platform can have incredible benefits, as well as dangerous downsides. Both raise ethical questions, which are not only of interest to parents but also of concern to each of us; we are all impacted. Hence, we must wake up to the danger these technologies, applications, etc. pose, ask appropriate questions, and demand that those in government take swift action to protect our youth, families, and society.

As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.

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8 Comments

  1. […] and then encouraging the children to keep those conversations secret from their parents. As I have written recently, there have been cases where parents have only found out that their child now identifies as […]

  2. Katherine on January 13, 2022 at 3:54 PM

    Dear Deborah,
    You sound like a beautiful seeker, who loves God and Our Lord with all of your heart and mind. If you have been drawn to Fr Boquet’s writing, you might be moved to borrow from the library a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to read further about all that our faith teaches. Is laid out clearly.

    I found this interesting post on a website called “faithbrowser” and submit here for your thought:

    “Transliterating a word from one language to another has to take into account the rules and limitations of both the languages. Sometimes the phonetics in one language cannot be directly rendered in a secondary language.

    Yerushalayim in Hebrew is rendered as Jerusalem in English.
    Would you then say that because there is no J in Hebrew, so Jerusalem, in English, must be a fabrication. Of course not!
    That is just how the name is transliterated from the original language.

    How about Yeriho? That’s Jericho in English. Or Nehar haYarden? That’s the River Jordan.

    Do you see how Hebrew names with Y are consistently rendered into the English language with a J.”

    – I do love Jesus, Yeshua, Emmanuel – our beloved teacher and savior. Neither the letter J nor “bad priests” will keep me from Him. Recognizing that Judas was numbered among the 12 Apostles, his evil act did not negate the good of the 11 imperfect men Christ chose and formed. (And the teaching and preaching that a renewed 12 and more carried out to the world). Immoral or abusive priests must be rooted out. The same holds true for teachers, coaches, parents, ministers, neighbors, cousins, bosses, spouses, therapists… more. We are all called to shine light upon dark acts.

  3. William Ivey on January 13, 2022 at 3:10 PM

    My 10 year old daughter was talking with a classmate about playing a game on the computer and her friend told her she should just say she’s 18 so they won’t get restricted in the game. In less than a week my daughter began getting contacted by strange people she didn’t know and were unconcerned that she is 10.

  4. Deborah on January 11, 2022 at 12:52 AM

    It is the result of having left behind the complete faith of the apostles. many churches do not teach to be born again, including the catholic church. It teaches to truth the church for their salvation. This is wrong. We are children of Yehovah, God Almighty , Creator of the Universe, and Yehoshua, the one who some church translated his name to Jesus, which as you know in incorrect. There is no letter J in the Hebrew alphabet, and the j was invented about 500 years ago. The other 1800 Was called by His given name, Yehoshua. No wonder the world is upside down. Religion and concern with not save the children. They are in need of something real, like a true Elohim who loves them, and they are born of the “Spirit of Yehovah. Once they are born again and their parents are also in the word daily, they will not go astray.
    Besides all these. the priests have been homosexuals for how long? The priests seduce the children, now wonder this sin has spread. I do not address you as Fr. For their is only one Father in Heaven. you do not have to write to me. i am praying for you to receive a visitation from Yehoshua or an angel to reveal to you the true gospel. Do not avoid the subject. It is your soul, and it is about your eternal life. I am placing you in the hands of Yehovah, and leave you there. But I keep praying for your salvation.
    Shalom
    Be well.

  5. Cheryl Knoll on January 10, 2022 at 1:58 PM

    I do not have children, but I do write poetry about the gender agenda. May God richly, richly bless you for the work you do. These are terrible times filled with lies to ruin families and young people. It’s Satan’s agenda and it has to be stopped. I support everything you stand for. I’m standing with you.

    • HLI Staff on January 11, 2022 at 9:03 AM

      Thank you kindly, Cheryl. We are pleased to be standing with you.

  6. Stanley L Bukowski on January 10, 2022 at 1:51 PM

    Fr. Boquet, thank you for the good advice. But how do we stop our children’s classmates from showing them what is on the smartphones?

    • HLI Staff on January 11, 2022 at 9:02 AM

      Stanley, that is a good question. There isn’t an easy answer because the issue stems deeper in society than simply exposure to an app. We need to have our children’s hearts. Loving parents must regularly expose their young children to the good, the true and the beautiful, to the high and noble, to the good examples we have in heroic lives of the saints. When parents talk with their children about why “no smartphones” and don’t allow them, that speaks volumes even when children might be exposed to this propaganda from their classmates’ phones, and being thus formed, children can more easily recognize evil when they see it. Would this secondary exposure be more limited than using an app like TikTok regularly on their own devices? Probably.

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