Why are we still waiting to ban TikTok?

At almost every conference I give on social media, I ask the audience the same question: "Is there anyone here who uses TikTok?"

Adults usually shrug it off with a "not me." A few timid hands go up from the younger crowd. I always joke that one day I'll have to run into one of those 40-plus million TikTok users in Türkiye. But the reality is that half of the country's population uses TikTok.

After one of these talks, a middle-aged mother came up to me and started by saying, "The young people here say 'we don't use it,' but for us mothers, TikTok is the real problem."

She told me her 15-year-old son watches TikTok videos for more than eight hours a day.

When they try to take his phone away, he becomes aggressive and damages things around the house.

I recommended they seek professional help.

Her eyes welled up.

"We took him to a psychologist. After the second session, he found the psychologist's TikTok account. He sent her a barrage of abusive messages."

The psychologist tried to explain, "I opened the account to see what young people like you are doing," but it didn't help. Because, like many others, she was posting content aimed at increasing her followers.

The young man reacted to that too.

The mother paused for a moment, swallowed hard, and said, "My son has drifted away from us. He doesn't want to go out in public. He's lost interest in school and his friends. He just scrolls through the screen."

All I could advise was for them to be patient and keep communicating with their child. As she was leaving, she said, "I wish TikTok would just be shut down. If they opened 'children's coffeehouses' instead, at least it would be more controlled."

The comparison was spot on. After I returned from military service and started my journalism career, I made the same comparison about the internet cafes where we used to spend hours. Indeed, in the late 1990s, internet cafes were exactly that—children's coffeehouses tucked away in neighborhood backstreets. Several generations were poisoned in those places.

But I have to admit, compared to TikTok, those were innocent. At least they weren't unlimited. An internet cafe had a door. It opened onto a street. It had an owner, a closing time. Parents at least knew where their child was. The environment was bad, unregulated, but still a physical space.

TikTok, on the other hand, is in children's pockets. On the school bus. After school. At the dinner table. At night, under the covers in bed.

Moreover, in internet cafes, children played the same game, looked at the same screen, and were in the same environment. On TikTok, there's an invisible system that learns what the child is watching, which video they stop at, what they replay, what they react to, and then selects new content to keep them on the screen longer.

So the source of the problem is not just that "white screen" alone.

What we're talking about is the domination of algorithms that seize children's minds and tear them away from their parents, their environment, and their school.

At this point, I want to draw attention to an important development.

The Istanbul Family Foundation has filed a lawsuit demanding transparency regarding social media algorithms that make children addicted to screens.

According to the foundation's three-year field study, as screen time increases, anxiety rises, the sense of belonging weakens, and identity crises deepen.

The foundation's chairman, Üner Karabıyık, has made a vital observation that we as a country need to focus on: "As screen time increases, so do levels of stress, distress, and anxiety. As stress, distress, and anxiety increase, the sense of belonging decreases. Belonging to the country decreases, and the tendency to say 'I'll look for my future in another country' increases."

We need to understand what the mother I quoted above meant when she said, "My son has drifted away from us."

Children who spend hours on TikTok first drift away from their families. Then they lose interest in school and disconnect from their friends. They don't want to socialize. They lose not only their time but also their social ties. Over time, this rupture damages the healthy relationship they should have with their social environment. It weakens their sense of belonging to their homeland, state, and nation. Even their spiritual feelings are eroded.

There are young people around us who say—and will say—"Just give me my TikTok, I don't care about anything else."

Let's recall: it was the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war. Russian young people were crying and filming themselves saying, "We don't care about the war, just give us back Instagram."

There are other concerns about the screen invasion of this Chinese-origin platform.

ByteDance, the company that owns the platform, did not launch TikTok in its own country, China. Users in China use a different platform developed by the same company called Douyin. So Chinese TikTok doesn't even exist in its own home country! Douyin is quite different. It imposes time limits on children, night-time access restrictions, and, more importantly, its algorithm is designed with sensitivity to Chinese traditions. Children in the rest of the world, however, are growing up inside a very different algorithmic ecosystem on TikTok.

We need to stop here and ask this question:

While China establishes a special digital protection model for its own children, why should Türkiye have no say over the algorithms to which its children are exposed?

Moreover, beyond the issue of what Turkish children are watching, there are also intelligence threats.

With TikTok's US operations being moved to the infrastructure of Oracle, a pro-Israel company, the platform's data security, algorithmic transparency, and dominance over societies have fallen into the hands of Zionists hostile to Türkiye. In this state, TikTok has become as much of an existential threat to the country as Israel itself.

With its effect of weakening belonging, it also stands before us as an issue of "mental sovereignty."

Just as Türkiye's land borders are monitored every second, just as its airspace is not left to foreign powers, just as energy security and food security are established—the mental security of children, young people, and adults should not be left to TikTok either, should it?