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Are the Kids on TikTok All Right?
A little distraction goes a long way these days
For a while last week, the most accurate reporting on the Covid crisis in the White House came from Claudia Conway, the 15-year-old daughter of Kellyanne and George, via TikTok. As the mother of two 15-year olds and a 17-year old who spend a fair amount of time on TikTok, I found this a bit unsettling. Unless I see tech causing my kids real physical or emotional harm, I no longer intervene about what apps they use and for how long they use them. But are the kids really all right on TikTok?
Claudia has been gaining popularity on the platform since mid-summer when Meg Conley wrote a piece for Arc Digital headlined “Journalism Comes For Teenage Trauma and Triumph on TikTok,” about the complicated dangers of this kind of teen popularity. Conley (and others elsewhere) argue that the rest of the world might never have known about Claudia Conway’s TikToks had New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz not tweeted about them. “I didn’t know George Conway and Kellyanne Conway bred anything other than discord until Lorenz shared their 15-year-old daughter’s TikTok videos on Twitter.”
The problem, Conley argues, is not TikTok, but the way the “newspaper of record” tweets about the teenage children of famous people. “Kids need the voice of the press speaking up on their…
