TikTok Goes The Clock On Teen Deaths

“Young Americans Are Dying at Alarming Rates,” including via drug overdosing, yet you’d never know it from TikTok commercials hailing the app’s generational “patriotism” but ignoring 13-yr-old girl who died from “chroming” bandied on its platform …

Not to blame TikTok alone (or any other social media forum) for every ill now befalling our young people. Yet, as the parents of Esra Haynes told an Australian media outlet, she never would have inhaled fumes from a deodorant can that caused here to go into cardiac arrest if she hadn't been influenced. A simple google search of “Tik Tok Chroming” will give you plenty of videos on “how chroming works;” in fact, numerous media outlets have dubbed it a “TikTok Trend.”

Just another “snap shot” of how social media is contributing to what the WSJ reports as a worsening death rate among our young, “reversing years of progress”? Car accidents, homicides & suicides are among the main culprits, the paper notes. But, so is drug overdoses of all kinds. The statistics don’t lie: “Between 2019 & 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7%, and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year, according to an analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society & Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, published in JAMA in March. That’s the highest increase for two consecutive years in the half-century that the government has publicly tracked such figures,” he said.

Davd Soul