"TikTok or the New Opium War"

Guillaume Férey is a student at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Hippolyte Septier is a student at the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay and at HEC Paris.

In his column published on April 23 in

, the essayist and lawyer Nicolas Baverez painted a most alarming picture: 40% of sixth-grade students do not master reading, writing or arithmetic.

If the figure increases every year and periodically worries, no one seems to take the measure.

Some still veil their faces, explaining that the French education system is the most unequal and that the children of good schools work as well as those of Asian colleges with traditional and intensive methods.

However, we should not forget a major parameter of the equation - the relationship of the new generation to screens - and this, especially since the Asian countries are aware of it, being careful not to administer to their children the poison that 'they concocted for those in competing countries.

Read also“My brain “swipes””: the TikTok generation facing the pitfalls of social networks

It is clear that today it is difficult to find parents around you who do not have to fight against TikTok and its famous “5 more minutes” retorted in chorus by their children.

But the apparent lightness of the thing cannot hide serious consequences that can be observed by all: loss of concentration (some studies showing that a goldfish has a greater capacity for concentration), behavioral disorders and drastic drop in reading among young people, whose mangas, largely financed by public money from the Culture Pass, seem to be the only ersatz.

TikTok is taking a proactive role in enslaving our younger generations to screens.

Its users spend 1 hour and 35 minutes (in 2022) per day there, four times longer than on Snapchat and three times longer than on Twitter.

All this thanks to an ultra-personalized algorithm, designed to place the user on a drip while constantly adapting to their tastes.

Today, we would like young people to believe that whoever doesn't scroll isn't satisfied.

And yet what do they get out of it?

Nothing.

Guillaume Ferey and Hippolyte Septier

The contrast, with a booming China that has shown double skill, is quite striking.

The latter first took advantage of the academic excellence of the Western powers with a massive sending of students to their campuses, resorted to industrial espionage and strategic investments in key sectors.

Then, the other part of his strategy was to actively participate in the decerebration of our younger generations.

Let's face it, the logic of TikTok and Chinese power is insidious: to intellectually paralyze the adversary and impose its total domination on it, thanks to a hardworking youth, full of merit and self-confidence.

Proof of this is the Douyin social network, only available in China,

offers the only content of science popularization experiences, visits to museums, the discovery of the country's landscapes and educational videos on history.

Recognizing the need for low screen exposure for children, China automatically blocks the app from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. and restricts usage time to 40 minutes per day for those under 14.

Faced with this observation, the response of the public authorities is long overdue.

Do not rely on TikTok, which, as a great prince of hypocrisy, has deployed a daily limit of 60 minutes, applied by default for people under 18, which can be removed by entering a simple password.

This single measure acts more like a smokescreen, intended to show the supposed good faith of the application to actually continue its lucrative dumbing down of our populations.

Today, we would like young people to believe that whoever doesn't scroll isn't satisfied.

And yet what do they get out of it?

Nothing.

France will recover a generation that is powerless in the face of major challenges.

Without a quick awareness, it will no longer be engineers, doctors or advanced mathematicians that will have to be trained, but a generation dumbed down by screens, excessively sedentary, nourished by the culture of emotion and behaving as a sum of consumerist individualisms with no common desire that will have to be assisted.

Without an alarm clock, their epitaph is already engraved.