In Florida, the Polk County sheriff’s office posted on Facebook, “There’s only 100 days left until Christmas. ![]() Please be kind to your schools & teachers.” The videos now survive mostly in the form of YouTube compilations. Now, even Congress is getting involved, with Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut calling on TikTok’s CEO to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee about how it affects “often young and impressionable users.” By last Wednesday, the company went so far as to ban any content with #despicablelicks and announced on Twitter, “We’re removing content and redirecting hashtags & search results to our Community Guidelines to discourage such behavior. According to USA Today, students as young as 15 years old have been arrested and charged in states including Kentucky, Florida, Arizona, and Alabama for offenses including vandalism, theft, and criminal mischief. And the law-and-order crackdown has begun. Watch any local-television coverage of the trend, and you’d think America’s public schools have descended into anarchy. ![]() Naturally, most of the burglars are boys. Others are simply standard-fare teenage bullying - like students stealing tennis shoes off unsuspecting feet from under restroom stalls - or just straight-up gross: see the one teen plundering urinal cakes with his bare hands. “Dawg every school fighting for their life rn,” reads the caption on one video. ![]() Some are naughtier than others, showing students, again, supposedly, taking Chromebooks, car parts off their principals’ wheels, and classroom pets, like one unlucky lizard stuffed into a backpack. The majority of the TikToks take place in school restrooms, where students pull sinks and soap dispensers from the walls, upend toilets from the floor, and smash mirrors into smithereens. It’s like Heathers, if the students all became kleptomaniacs and not something more tragicomic (though I suppose the real Winona Ryder does have a shoplifting record). Now there are hundreds of the TikToks, showing students at high schools across the country supposedly stealing school security cameras, science-lab equipment, and school supplies. ![]() Then, when another user posted a similar video, unzipping his JanSport to reveal a hand-sanitizer dispenser, with the caption “Only a month into school and got this absolute devious lick,” the trend exploded, with the video racking up over 7.2 million views in two days. To read through the media’s and institutional responses to the trend is to encounter an adult population who willfully misunderstands, and forgets, what it’s like to be a teen, and what you often end up doing when you’re told not to do something.įor background: It all began when a teenager on the app posted a video of himself taking a stolen box of face masks out of his school backpack (a “lick,” according to Urban Dictionary, is a “successful type of theft”). Senator despair for the wayward youth and the app they claim is abetting their depredation. You have to look no further than TikTok, where the “Devious Licks Challenge” is making school administrators, internet moralists, and even a U.S. In-person school is finally back, and apparently, already the kids are running wild.
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