Dear Editor,

There is a war being waged on the minds of Jamaica’s children (and adults if we’re honest). It does not arrive with gunshots, but with a glowing screen — an endlessly scrolling feed, algorithmically engineered to colonise attention and hollow out the self. The weapon is TikTok. The nation that built this platform has already decided its own children must be protected from it.

In Minister of Health Dr Christopher Tufton’s recent comments suggesting the growing need for considering national social media restrictions he raised an alarm backed by serious science. In his landmark 2024 book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt documents a catastrophic collapse in adolescent mental health, beginning around 2012 — precisely when smartphones and social media entered teenage life at scale. Rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among young people rose sharply and sustained. Hospital admissions for teenage girls with self-inflicted injuries climbed nearly 190 per cent in a decade. The data spans the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. The pattern is identical. Haidt’s conclusion: This is not coincidence; this is causation.

Haidt identifies TikTok’s short-form video format as the most potent version of this harm — a dopamine trap calibrated to each user’s psychological vulnerabilities, designed not to entertain but to addict. Jamaican children (and adults) are not immune. The human brain’s reward circuitry is universal. In many respects our children may be more vulnerable, given thinner mental health infrastructure and a rapid, largely unmediated digital invasion.

But TikTok is not simply a health hazard. It is a geopolitical instrument. Owned by ByteDance and operating under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law — which compels cooperation with State intelligence on demand — TikTok harvests granular data on millions of foreign users while its algorithm determines, under Beijing’s oversight, what those users see and think about. The US, EU, India, and Australia have all restricted or banned it over these concerns. This is not paranoia. It is the settled position of allied intelligence agencies.

The most damning evidence, however, is Beijing’s own behaviour. Chinese children do not have access to TikTok. They use Douyin — a domestic version capped at 40 minutes per day for under-14s, filled with educational and patriotic content, stripped of the infinite scroll. The architects of TikTok have protected their own children from it while exporting the unregulated, addictive version to the children of the rest of the world. The drug dealer who does not use his own product is a figure we recognise. ByteDance is doing something structurally identical.

Jamaica must act. Haidt’s recommendations are practical: smartphone-free schools, no social media before 16, and age verification that places legal liability on platforms rather than overwhelmed parents. On TikTok specifically, the case for an under-18 ban — and a broader national security review of the platform’s operations — is overwhelming. We do not allow foreign states to run intelligence operations on our soil, so why do we allow them to run influence operations in our children’s minds?

China has made its choice for its own children. It has made a different choice for ours. Jamaica and other Caribbean nations must make their own before another generation is lost to the feed.

Francesca Tavares

Attorney-at-law

francescatavares@yahoo.com