NEWS AND OPINION – INTERNET SOCIAL MEDIA: TikTok is a very fast growing online social media business having acquired over 1 billion monthly users in 3 years. It is owned by a Chinese business: ByteDance.
It seems to me that its target is young people who want to make short, comedic videos with the help of TikTok which provides the music and other features. It can be entertaining and harmless, even useful. Sadly, as often happens, there is a small minority of participants who abuse the platform and companion animals in a desire to achieve notoriety and millions of hits for their abominable videos.
These animal abuse videos (the perpetrators don’t see it as abusive) are an extension of the videos we have seen in the past on Facebook where for example thugs throw cats large distances into lakes and buildings. But the Tiktok dog and cat video craze is animal abuse dressed up with music and a comedy element making them more sinister and unpleasant. They show a disregard and disrespect for animals. Is this how young people relate to animals? Is this how ignorant they typically are in Western civilisations?
Put it in a bun craze
One craze which amuses many young people is to put an elastic band around the ears of cats to see the reaction. The video shows the reaction. The idiot ‘@nolanbobinger’ says that he laughed for 27 minutes. This video has been seen an astonishing 2 million times indicating that a sizeable body of people have a disrespectful attitude towards companion animals which makes animal abuse easy.
@nolanbobinger When I tell you I laughed for a good 27 minutes @chanadiemachal car is Broken ##foryoupage ##foryou
Note: videos on this site are often made by third parties and held on YouTube servers or the servers of other businesses. Sometimes the videos are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. It that has happened I apologise but I have no control over it.
Slapping cats and dogs
Another craze is to slap cats and dogs in sync to the supplied music which enrages the animals. The humans think it is great fun. A small tap might be fun but this is abuse because it is persistent slapping.
Expletives
These TikTokers like to use rude language. The ‘F’ word is used freely which reinforces my view that these are ignorant, ill-educated fools who need to occupy their minds more productively and usefully. Some videos show users swearing at their companion animals. This is cruel and very bad for the human-animal bond. Many years ago I can remember a man shouting an his cats. That video did well. Same thing. Same bad stuff.
Mild abuse
There is a body of work with shows mild cat abuse. It is objectionable. The cats’ owners see nothing wrong in it. They should not be cat owners. Click on the link below to see one example.
CAT VIDEO ENTERTAINS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE CAT’S WELFARE
PETA calls on the social media platform to ban them – the people and their videos – permanently. It is a troubling development. It seems that online social media has unearthed a dark, distasteful side to the mentality of young people which expresses itself through cruel videos. It puts me off humanity.
