How is LC4MP Inaccurately Portrayed in TikTok Usage?

When we think about the negatives of social media apps, often there's a discussion on how it can cause anxiety, depression, disordered behaviors, and other factors that have a poor influence on mental health. The influence of social media can be detrimental to one’s sense of self and can make us self-conscious. Not to mention, the overconsumption of TikTok and other social media is what either contributes to or amplifies the severity mental health issues.

In 2021, a study was conducted of 3036 Chinese students in their first and second years of high school, who were all avid users of TikTok. There was an investigation into the question if there was a direct correlation between TikTok use disorder and mental health illnesses including anxiety and depression. Based on the results of the experiment, the overuse of TikTok did have a connection to memory loss, anxiety and stress, as well as depression (Sha & Dong, 2021)

Nonetheless, LC4MP cannot be proven to be the direct cause of mental illnesses caused by overconsumption of TikTok videos, since the theory focuses on the act of viewing mediated messages. To simply put it, the theory proves that we can experience addictive-like behaviors since it compels us to watch too many TikTok videos by overfiring our slow encoding of rigid associations (Fisher & Weber 2020).

Yet, the mental illnesses we may experience due to it are not caused by the lack of self-control we have to stop physically scrolling, but the content we are consuming on TikTok, and potentially other social media sites. Another thing to think about is the people we are interacting with, what we choose to post online, and the habit of checking our phones for updates.

LC4MP does not determine the type of content on TikTok we consume, rather the interactions we have with each video make it vary in how much it is recommended to us.

Also, the type that we choose to consume whether it is conscious or not, is what has an effect on our mental health. Contributions to mental health issues are age, gender, culture, and specific experiences and expectations we have for ourselves, and that is something that can easily be reflected in the type of content we watch, but LC4MP does not account for it.