This Ramadan, Delete TikTok Before It Deletes You

Here we go. Another out-of-touch loser who doesn’t get progress and technology trying to tell us TikTok is haraam.

Doesn’t he know that TikTok is also being used for so much dawah and helping people with mental health issues deal with things in a way that other platforms simply haven’t?

I suppose he wants us to go back to communicating with carrier pigeons and smoke signals? Well, I’m not going to even bother reading this dumpster fire of an article because nothing is going to make me stop using TikTok.

Great.

Now that we’ve got all those points out of the way, here are a few reasons why you should delete TikTok anyway:

Do you remember that really viral TikTok by someone average looking talking about a balanced meal with normal food?

  Speaking of God, the impact of TikTok on your mental and physical health may be nothing compared to what it does to your soul.

Through TikTok, it is likely that the average user will be exposed to more temptation, more bad behavior, more swearing, more envy, more misinformation, and more hatred in a single sitting than previous generations were exposed to in a year. Or maybe even a lifetime. Day after day, night after night, it nudges you toward the lowest common denominator. Again, there will be many who will make a convincing case for the spiritually uplifting side of TikTok and the ease with which powerful reminders are shared. I accept this point, but feel that it would be naive to believe that you will somehow manage to get solely the good and sidestep the rest.

By the way, even these powerful reminders are stripped of all context and reduced to pure soundbites. The nuance, the depth, and the beauty of our faith is being sacrificed for the punchline.

To think it’s not going to change your connection to your faith would be like a Muslim going to the club, having the music blaring, being surrounded by people dancing in revealing clothes, in a venue drenched with alcohol, and still insisting that they are not going to let any of that affect them because they are here to do da’wah. It is not wishful thinking, it is wilful delusion.

Muslims have had a problem with uniting with each other well before social media came into existence. However, the advent of TikTok and its ilk have made an almost impossible job even more impossible somehow.

Ever wondered why we are more polarised than ever? Brothers against sisters, black against white, liberals against conservatives, etc…? Yes, it is because we are a divided community, but that is not the whole story.

The reason why we feel more divided than we have ever felt before is not by chance, but by design. Social media serves to reinforce echo chambers so that we all feel that our faith is constantly under threat by fringe actors from opposite ends of the spectrum to wherever you are. This makes perfectly normal people become deeply entrenched in their positions. I believe that the algorithm will slowly, but surely, push you to become the most extreme version of your view, doubling down on the rhetoric and seeing other views as existential threats that need to be destroyed instead of debated.

According to various outlets, TikTok tracks your personal movements and data more than any other social media App in history. Who it sells this data to or what it uses this data for is unclear. What we do know is that the Pentagon, the British Government, and other institutions have banned it because facial recognition software combined with AI and other technology allows your privacy to be invaded in a way that simply was unimaginable even 5 years ago.

All social media is addictive, but some of them are addictive like Coke and others are addictive like Cocaine. In my subjective opinion, TikTok is the latter. It is successful because it has cracked the code of the basest human desires. Give people the lowest common denominator and keep giving it non-stop in extremely short bites.

I know what I am stating is hard to accept, especially if you are on the platform. The chances are most of your friends are on it too. In fact, TikTok may have become the primary way you communicate with people and receive information. It is addictive and leaving it will be hard.

So, alhamdulillah for the fact that we have months like Ramadan that are designed by our Creator to help us leave vices and to replace them with something better. It is the ultimate spiritual holiday away from the rat race and the vices that accumulate over time. It is the spiritual spring clean for the soul where we give ourselves a refresher and refocus on our Creator and our purpose in life. There is no better time to take back control. You can give up food and drink for daylight hours this month and we need them to survive.

If you find it difficult, talk to your friends. Do it as a group. Do it as a family. Do it for each other and do it for the sake of Allah .

Trust me, you can do this.

This Ramadan, delete TikTok before it deletes you.

Related:

 – Get Your Phone Ramadan Ready!

 – Podcast: Damage Control With Digital Dinosaurs – On The Fiqh of Social Media | Omar Usman