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Growing up on TikTok
"It's just a bit of fun."
"It's how kids connect these days, how they learn about the world, how they express themselves and engage. Children have a right to social media as long as we remove the harmful bits."
But have you actually looked?
TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps used by children today. Its format — the infinite scroll feed — is particularly good at capturing attention. Of the hundreds of children we meet every year, many spend hours a day on TikTok.
It's true that for most children, we see a lot less explicitly harmful content on feeds nowadays. Fewer self-harm scars, less violence, minimal explicit nudity.
But social connection? In this report, we show that on TikTok, children spend almost all of their time passively scrolling and consuming. It's rare for a post by a friend to pop up in the feed. Interaction with people they actually know makes up only a small proportion of time spent on the platform — and even then, it is often limited to lightweight exchanges, such as sending thumbs-up emojis to maintain 'streaks'.
Children are learning about the world on TikTok. This report shows what world they're seeing: feeds are made up of a targeted reflection of what commercial actors think will capture their attention. That includes posts about sports they're interested in or bands they like. It also includes gambling adverts, OnlyFans actors promoting their channels, beauty influencers selling makeup.
A bit of fun? For many children in this research it's hours a day, thousands of videos a week, during the school day and at 3am. Children say it's entertaining and good for filling time when they're bored. But they also say they feel tired, guilty or disappointed in themselves afterwards.
TikTok is a big part of childhood
Every year we speak to hundreds of children and ask which apps and platforms they use, and review the screen time data on their phones.
Unsurprisingly to most parents, teachers, or anyone familiar with children's digital lives, TikTok has become one of the most-used apps among young people in recent years. Almost all teenagers use TikTok. Many use it for hours per day.
TikTok is a short-form video-sharing app built around algorithmically personalised content feeds.
These features are not unique to TikTok. Over time, platforms copy each other's most successful features.
TikTok brought the FYP to the UK
Instagram introduced Reels
Snapchat launched Spotlight
YouTube integrated Shorts
Facebook copied Reels
Netflix launched Clips
This is true of many other features — Streaks keep you coming back every day, Filters make it easier to beautify your photos, Stories encourage more frequent, light touch sharing. For a detailed breakdown of specific features across all major platforms – and a timeline of how they spread across them, click here.
When we speak to children and young people about how they use TikTok — and observe them using it in practice — the majority of time spent on the app is typically focused on scrolling the "For You" page.
While TikTok includes features such as group and one-to-one messaging, children and young people more commonly use other platforms — particularly Snapchat — for direct communication.
This report represents the most detailed portrait of a child's life on TikTok so far. A handful of platforms are shaping the lives of a generation of children. The amount of research that actually examines what children see and do on them is, relative to the impact, very small.
Over the last fifteen years, we've worked hard to make children's online lives more visible. In our experience there is nothing that changes how people think about children's social media use than forcing them to sit through five minutes of your average child's TikTok feed.
Connect Live is a research tool we developed that enables us to gather granular usage data of every minute a child spends on each app on their phone. It can also be used to prompt short surveys to measure the impact of a scrolling session on things like wellbeing or cognitive performance.
In this report: Data from a pilot study conducted in xx 2026 with 23 children across the UK
Data donation is available to every TikTok user — simply request your data and, under GDPR, the platform must provide every single video watched in a given time period, and for how many milliseconds. We can analyse advertising served, accounts that appear most often, and what grabs attention the most.
In this report: Data from a small-scale test conducted in xx 2026 with a subset of 7 children from across the UK
Screen record is a tool we've used for over ten years to study what social media actually looks like through the eyes of a child. Ask a child to activate their phone's in-built screen recorder while scrolling TikTok. Consent and careful data handling are essential.
In this report: Screen record samples collected in xx 2026 with 23 children across the UK
Ethnography and film are our bread and butter, and still the best way of understanding how digital technology fits into the wider picture of a child's life. Visiting children in-home, investing time exploring and documenting their lives, hearing them talk about their relationship with social media.
In this report: Interviews conducted in xx 2026 with a subset of 10 children across the UK
Participants were aged 14–16 and recruited on the basis that they used TikTok. They were not selected because they were unusually high or low users, had experienced specific harms, or represented extreme cases. They represent a range of backgrounds and demographics, with varying levels of self-reported TikTok use — from less than an hour a day to more than three hours daily.
For a more detailed breakdown of methodology and sample, see here.