There is general agreement that the administrators of the burgeoning social media website TikTok are turning a blind eye to animal abuse on their website. This has been known for several years. Nothing has been done about it or so it seems. It is often what I would call ‘casual animal abuse’ such as slapping a domestic cat. This is the human caregiver of a domestic cat slapping their cat to try and make a so called “funny cat video” which causes some people to laugh out loud. Both the perpetrator of the animal abuse and the idiotic commenters are behaving shamefully.
However, TikTok simply reflects what happens in society in general. It is a window to domestic animal abuse which happens all around us all the time. We shouldn’t, therefore, be surprised about what we see on TikTok but we should be dismayed at the inability or unwillingness of TikTok’s administrators to stop it.
And perhaps the problem is not so much about an unwillingness but an inability to stop it as there are so many uploads to this social media platform that TikTok does not have enough monitors to regulate their website properly.
The result is that abuse against domestic dogs and cats is normalised. Clearly, the owner who slaps or strangles their cat for fun while videoing it doesn’t give a damn about the welfare of their cat although they might think they do. Their cat is simply a vehicle to try and achieve that 15 precious minutes of fame that they so crave.
Recently I wrote about what I call ‘mild cat abuse’. It doesn’t make it any more acceptable. In one video the woman was putting her distressed and very attractive cat into a bath tub full of water. The cat did not need a bath and the cat was upset and crying out. That’s mild abuse and remarkably the video achieved several million hits. I have no idea why. Do people enjoy seeing cats in distress?
In another video a young woman holds her young cat in front of a smart phone and the app on her smartphone makes her face ripple, distorting it dramatically. Her cat becomes very frightened because of this and the background music. She laughs at the effect that it has on her cat. Another cat owner who is totally unsuited to the task. The video is below and it is disgusting.
Two years ago, on Reddit.com, a user posted that the amount of animal abuse videos on TikTok was disturbing. They said that they became bored during the Covid lockdown and so dipped into TikTok but found that there was a lot of animal abuse videos on the site which upset them. And they were also upset by “the amount of people defending it too” which they found scary. They said: “I got jumped by commenters for calling out messed up shit. I’m pretty much ready to delete this shitty app now”.
The comments to that Reddit.com post are enlightening. One of them is directly below.
The sad truth of the matter is that it isn’t just TikTok which has this problem. The other social media platforms are just the same. When you report animal abuse videos (as they request) they simply don’t remove them. And they can be the worst kind of animal abuse such as killing cats. Nothing happens. Nada. You can report the matter but it is like talking to a black hole.
Social media is responsible for an increase I would argue in cruelty against animals. It is just another element in the gradual fraying at the edges or fragmentation at the centre of society currently. Things are going wrong in society and it isn’t just animal abuse on social media. A contributor to this breakdown in the fabric of society is, however, social media platforms. Note: social media does a lot of good too BUT there is too much bad stuff on these platforms.
Madison Rodgers of Cat Protection in the UK, in an interview with The Sun newspaper, said: “This kind of content desensitises people to abuse and the signs of stress and cats. It is widely available on TikTok and it concerns us because people could think this is okay and that will only normalise this kind of behaviour towards pets. It is not acceptable or funny; it animal cruelty. It’s stressful and traumatising for these pets. The line between candid moments and abuse is being blurred.”
Below are some more articles on social media.
