I TRIED TIKTOK: WHAT I FOUND WAS ANGER, AND FRUSTRATION. NOT ENTERTAINMENT.

24 million Brits scroll through fury and frustration daily. I tried it to understand why.

People I know scroll through dozens of videos in three minutes. I’ve counted. You don’t need peer-reviewed studies to validate what you can see. Direct observation doesn’t require institutional permission to be accurate.

Each one: angry face, raised voice, grievance, scroll. Frustration radiating from every frame. Their thumbs move with mechanical precision seeking something. Not entertainment. Content saturated with anger and frustration—and they keep scrolling for more.

Twenty-four million Brits are doing this. Daily. I created an account and spent two months observing what the algorithm served me before boredom set in. Not as academic research. Because understanding comes through direct experience—the practice itself is realisation.

I’m an independent blogger who uses social media but doesn’t follow the hive—that aesthetic uniformity, synchronised outrage, collective belonging that erases individual judgement. The algorithm correctly identified I’m not hive-optimised. So instead of cat videos: professionally curated fury and frustration.

One annoyed commentator after another. Geopolitical grievances. Economic injustice. Institutional failures. Anger and frustration saturate the content.

But here’s what makes this insidious: you won’t necessarily get what I got. I observed endless political grievance because that’s what the algorithm learned would keep me watching. You might get fitness influencers triggering envy. Or lifestyle content making you feel inadequate. The emotion varies per user. The compulsive scrolling doesn’t.

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The Numbers Nobody’s Discussing.

According to Sprout Social’s 2025 analysis, 24.8 million UK users. That’s 54% of the population. Half of everyone you know.

We Are Social’s Digital 2024 report: UK users spend 49 hours monthly—highest in the world. That’s more time than UK adults spend cooking, exercising, or having sex.

But averages hide the pattern: 20% of users account for 80% of usage time. A concentrated minority experiencing catastrophic cognitive damage whilst the majority thinks “I’m fine, I only use it a bit.” You’re either in the 20% now, or on the same trajectory, just further behind.

Bristol: 470,000 population × 38% penetration = roughly 180,000 users. Walk through Cabot Circus on any Saturday. Count the scrollers. Next time you’re at Temple Meads during rush hour, watch the thumb movements. Mechanical. Automatic. Seeking whatever the algorithm learned captures them individually.

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What It Actually Is.

You’re thinking: “Moral panic about new technology.”

No. TV shows ended. Books had final pages. TikTok is architecturally infinite. Each scroll delivers a micro-hit of possibility. That’s not bug. That’s feature.

Variable ratio reinforcement. Slot machine psychology. Did engineers deliberately design an addiction engine?

Start with Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what stupidity explains. They chased engagement metrics.

But here’s the limit: When your “unintended side effect” generates billions, and you don’t fix it despite knowing the harm, and you hire psychologists to make it MORE addictive—at what point does “unintended” become convenient lie?

You scroll. Nothing. Scroll. Nothing. Scroll—BOOM. Dopamine spike.

That’s not entertainment. That’s a slot machine. The house always wins. And the house is in Beijing.

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The Scroll.

The algorithm watches you. Learns you. Studies what makes you pause, what emotional content captures you—anger at injustice, envy of lifestyles, validation of beliefs, whatever psychological vulnerability it can exploit.

Then feeds you more. Not randomly. Precisely. Like a drug dealer who studied psychology at Cambridge.

No endpoint. You know what else has no endpoint? Death. But death has the courtesy to be honest.

Ask anyone their TikTok time. They’ll underestimate by half. “Quick scroll” equals 45 minutes gone. They genuinely cannot track time whilst scrolling. The platform overrides your brain’s internal clock.

And the sound. Three seconds of music—scroll—two seconds shouting—scroll—five seconds different music—scroll. Fragment after fragment. Anyone within earshot experiences involuntary cognitive disruption. Pattern beginning—scroll—interrupted. Again. Again.

Next time you’re at Bristol Bus Station during evening rush, count how many are inflicting this sonic fragmentation on everyone around them. The scroll isn’t just destroying the user’s brain. It’s degrading the cognitive environment for everyone nearby.

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Why Britain Fell Hardest.

UK has higher TikTok penetration than most European nations. Why?

Cultural factors: British irony, class performance, self-deprecation compress perfectly into short-form video.

Structural factors: Europe’s worst housing crisis. When you can’t afford private space, TikTok becomes the room you don’t have. Long commutes. Dead time becomes scroll time. And the weather. Eight months of rain creates eight months of scrolling.

Institutional collapse: NHS trust: 54%. Police: 47%. Government: 23%.

Peter Principle operating at scale: People competent at getting promoted rise to positions requiring actual expertise. Then fail publicly. Bristol City Council run by people good at local campaigning (their competence ceiling), now making complex policy decisions (past their ceiling).

Michels’ Iron Law: Institutional structures inevitably serve institutional interests over stated objectives. NHS serves NHS bureaucracy, not patients. When the gap between stated mission and actual behaviour becomes impossible to ignore—trust collapses.

Nobody trusts the NHS, police, or government. But somehow—somehow—24 million Brits trust an algorithm written by a company whose domestic version they won’t let their own kids use. That’s a suicide note written in emoji.

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The China Question.

ByteDance. Chinese company. Chinese law.

Douyin—Chinese domestic version—operates under different rules. Usage limits for minors. Educational content prioritisation. Restricted access hours.

Same company. Same technology. Different markets.

Hanlon’s Razor again: Maybe just optimisation without considering consequences.

But when patterns become systematic and benefit specific parties, incompetence stops being adequate explanation.

China looked at TikTok and said: Too dangerous for our kids. Then at Britain: Perfect for theirs.

Ask the Nabaz question: who benefits? ByteDance profits. Chinese government gains strategic advantage. Not by making everyone angry—by making everyone seek whatever emotional content the algorithm identified as their psychological hook. The content doesn’t matter. The compulsive seeking does.

Follow the institutional incentives, not stated intentions.

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What Gets Destroyed.

Attention spans: Studies show short-form video users test significantly lower on sustained focus tasks. Not laziness. Neurology. Like a muscle you stopped using. Except instead of getting fat, your brain gets stupid.

But 80% of cognitive damage concentrates in 20% of users—the three-plus hours daily scrollers. They’re canaries. The rest are breathing the same gas, just slower.

Reading itself: UK literacy research indicates significant decline in voluntary reading amongst 16-24s. Timeline matches TikTok adoption. Walk into Waterstones. Who’s browsing? Over-40s. The reading habit died in a decade.

Critical thinking: No pause for evaluation. Just: consume emotion, scroll, next emotion, scroll. Pattern recognition without contemplation. Outrage without understanding.

Oh, you learned something on TikTok? Now tell me what you learned yesterday. Can’t remember? Your brain processed it like a kebab at 2am—briefly satisfying, immediately forgotten.

Democratic participation: You cannot hold Bristol City Council accountable if you can’t focus long enough to read the FOI response. Democracy requires sustained attention. TikTok systematically destroys it.

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Bristol’s 180,000.

Bristol: housing crisis, homelessness epidemic, transport chaos.

Also: 180,000 TikTok users spending 90-plus minutes daily scrolling.

Arithmetic: roughly 270,000 hours of Bristol attention extracted daily. Time not spent organising responses, attending meetings, reading investigative journalism.

The platform doesn’t show solutions. It shows content about problems. Training 180,000 Bristol residents for impotent rage instead of collective resistance.

Bristol City Council claims to want citizen engagement. The mechanisms suggest otherwise: consultations that gather dust, meetings scheduled at inconvenient times, FOI processes that obstruct rather than inform.

Michels’ Iron Law: Real engagement threatens organisational autonomy. So engagement becomes performative. Organisations protecting themselves from populations they claim to serve.

Despite widespread discontent, civic participation remains pathetically low. Watch Bristol any evening. Thousands scrolling. Zero organising.

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Why Nothing Stops It.

Peter Principle: MPs handling tech regulation got there through constituency politics, not technical expertise. Now they’re asking TikTok executives about algorithms they don’t understand, nodding along to reassurances they can’t evaluate.

Twenty-four million users equals massive voting bloc. Restrict platform equals lose election.

Michels’ Iron Law: Parliament’s stated objective: protect citizens. Actual objective: preserve Parliamentary authority. Admitting they let 24 million Brits get cognitively captured undermines authority. Therefore: silence.

The institution serves itself, not you.

And Pareto’s principle: 20% of the problem—heavy addiction amongst minors—would require 80% of political effort. Politicians do the reverse: 80% effort on 20% impact—committee hearings that change nothing, concern statements that mean nothing—because it looks like action without requiring confrontation.

Theatre. All of it.

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What You’ll Do Next.

Here’s what happens: You’ll probably check TikTok. Not to verify claims. Because your brain craves the dopamine hit and the urge is building right now.

Some will delete the app. Most will reinstall it within days. Withdrawal is physiological, not philosophical.

Most will do nothing. You’ll recognise the pattern, feel disturbed, continue scrolling.

Watch what you do in the next five minutes.

When your thumb moves towards the app—TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, whatever—you’ll understand everything described. Not intellectually. Neurologically.

The practice itself becomes the proof. Your direct experience will validate every pattern. That’s the epistemological foundation: trusting what you can clearly see.

Even knowing this, even understanding the mechanism—none of that makes resistance easier.

Knowledge isn’t immunity. Understanding the trap doesn’t help you escape it.

You either recognise yourself in this description—which means you’re already captured—or you don’t recognise yourself, which means the capture is complete enough that you can’t see it anymore.

Either way, the algorithm wins.

Twenty-four million brains. One hundred eighty thousand in Bristol alone. One algorithm. No endpoint.

And Britain is still scrolling.

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Sources & Further Research.

UK Usage: Sprout Social (2025), UKOM (June 2024), We Are Social & Meltwater (2024), Ofcom

Mental Health: Ramsden & Talbot (2024) International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, Regehr et al. (2024) UCL, Jain et al. (2025) SAGE Journals

Algorithm: Harvard Kennedy School (2025) HKS Misinformation Review, BBC (2024)

Frameworks: Dōgen Zenji Shōbōgenzō, Pareto 80/20, Hanlon’s Razor, Peter & Hull The Peter Principle (1969), Michels Political Parties (1911)

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Comments open—especially from TikTok users who recognise these patterns, or who think I’ve got it wrong. Either way, you read to the end. That proves something.