Lack of regulation lets TikTok off the hook and enables lawlessness to run rampant - David Behrens

They have changed their minds all of a sudden. But here’s the bit I don’t understand: it used to cost me £20 a month to rent my phone line so why am I being charged only £3 less for not having one? Someone is benefiting from this arrangement and it’s not me.

I expected nothing better. It’s just another example of businesses treating us all like cash dispensers that will pay out at the press of a button.

You see this everywhere and you seldom ask questions because you know no-one’s listening. But just occasionally, the arm-twisting is so brazen that you wonder how they’re getting away with it.

Last weekend I stopped at a filling station in outer London and reached for one of the plastic gloves that stop you catching coronavirus or worse from the handle of a petrol pump with more germs than a toilet seat in a condemned factory. But there were no gloves – just a sticker telling me that if I wanted one I would have to buy it at the kiosk to “help the environment”. This from an oil company that is probably the biggest polluter on the planet.

I weighed up the options: hand over yet more money or risk E. coli? I didn’t fancy either so I drove off to find a different filling station.

Are we really as credulous as these companies seem to think? Well, you or I might not be but our children and grandchildren regrettably very much are.

The proof is to be found on TikTok, which is what today’s teenagers are glued to instead of a telephone receiver – and if your own parents thought Dial-a-Disc was somewhere along the road to sin, TikTok is in the overtaking lane.

It would be easy to dismiss it as vapid nonsense, but while a lot of it is merely mindless some of its contents are objectively dangerous. This week it was the apparatus through which children in Southampton were encouraged to take paracetamol in a “challenge” to see who could stay in hospital the longest. The consequences of that do not bear thinking about.

A few days earlier TikTok had been used to incite mass looting in the West End of London. Packs of motiveless youths protected by a herd mentality convinced themselves they could grab what they wanted from JD Sports and presumably take it back later if it was the wrong size. Similar outbreaks followed in the capital’s suburbs, causing the Metropolitan Police to pause their own misuse of social media and take to the streets in flak jackets.

For once, the boot was on the other foot: the customers had taken control. But this was anarchy by any other name and there’s a law against that. If there were not, you’d have seen Pro-Celebrity Looting on Channel 5 by now.

Yet TikTok manages to avoid legal responsibility for the content it distributes because other people created it. As arguments go, it’s like the Kray twins pleading not guilty to murder because they had delegated the job to a hitman.

You’d have thought that some regulator or other could make it do a better job of policing itself. But they can’t because TikTok is based in China and policing isn’t China’s strong point.

It would be perfectly easy for our own government to put a stop to this: it could mandate at a stroke that internet companies block access to TikTok in the way they do to pirated movie and music websites. Isn’t inciting anarchy at least as serious as copyright infringement?

However, the UK ruled out a full-scale ban earlier this year, deciding instead to prohibit TikTok only on the government’s own phones. This would have made sense if it were MPs who were looting in Oxford Street and overdosing on headache pills but it wasn’t; it was impressionable youngsters – those least likely to see when they’re being exploited and the most in need of protection.

And what even is the argument in favour of TikTok? It surely isn’t freedom of speech because its facility for mass manipulation is the very opposite of freedom.

No, what we have here is a time bomb tick-tocking within society and the sooner it’s dispatched to technology heaven along with the landline, the better.